Hobbies

Yesterday FD and I met with my brother and sister-in-law, had dinner at Bagel Country. We rode our bikes up to Skokie and I didn't even care how I looked. It's Bagel Country.

But we stopped off at my parents first.

"What's on your skirt?" first thing my mother says to me. I'm wearing blue culottes and there is some weird white chalky-looking something on my backside, something from the wash. I tell her it's very 9 days.

She's in the basement sweeping the floor and doing laundry, and my father is out buying plants for his award winning, were there an award in Skokie, garden. He has his landscaper put them in. His attention to this, when the doctors wrote him off just last week, is equivalent to mine with the fish tanks, but better.

Mother complains to me that my father has taken the car and gone to get some lunch, but it's been over an hour and she's worried. He didn't take his phone, either. He hasn't told her the truth, that he's buying plants.

We walk upstairs (I've fallen down this narrow stairway and cringe every time I see her do this, G-d should protect her) and I once again offer to install a washer-dryer in the bathroom upstairs. She won't do it, even if we pay. And she WON'T use the cane. This is for old people.

My father walks in the door he looks like he's about to say Shmah, seriously.

"Where've you been shmaying?" I ask. Now I understand the origin of this Yiddish for wandering.

"I can't talk," he says and sits down on the couch in the den. "Tired." He revives with a little with water, like his plants. My mother walks in and screams at him. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? He whispers something about flats of plants in the T-bird. I tell him how nice his garden is looking, and it is.

FD asks why the cell phones are on the floor. My father gives over the obvious answer. They're charging. "But you might trip on the cords. Why don't you. . ."

My father waves it away, whatever he's going to say.

Flying North