Lovely ... ? Patient ... ? Puh-leeze!
MY dad took Father’s Day off and asked me to write his column for him again. Father’s Day. What a thing to celebrate.
“You’re the Dorothy Parker of the suburbs,” he says.
“Who’s she, Dad?”
“Never mind,” he snorts, and goes back to watching the Weather Channel.
You probably don’t remember me. I’m the older daughter, the lovely and patient one. I don’t know if my dad is being all ironic or what when he calls me that. Seriously, without me, this house would fall apart. I’m the mortar between the bricks. I’m the icing on a seven-layer crazy cake.
Right now, my dad is on the couch with my two brothers. They are watching TV and making clucky noises with their tongues. They sound like three monkeys with peanut butter stuck to the roofs of their mouths.
“Dad!” I scream.
“Yes?”
“Quit clucking!”
“We’re just practicing our jungle noises,” my dad explains.
“Cluck-cluck-cluck-cluck-cluck,” clucks my little brother.
It’s been even weirder than usual around here lately. Dad says he thinks “the marriage is played out” and that 25 years is all that anyone should have to suffer, “particularly a nice woman like your mother.”
Mom says marriage is “an antiquated institution that betrays our Calvinist heritage.”
“But it sure beats the crap out of dating again,” says my dad.
“That’s for sure,” says Mom.
Isn’t love, you know, kind of amazing?
All I can say is it’s good they have their own separate interests. In my mom’s case, it’s herself. In my dad’s case, it’s working on the house. He says our house used to be one of those little drive-through huts where you could buy gum and smokes. So I guess it needs a little work.
Every weekend he’s out in the backyard fixing things up. When a project goes badly, he flings stuff. When it goes well, he whistles old Tijuana Brass songs. Pretty much all the songs he likes date from the early 1700s.
Seriously, this is what my dad thinks: He thinks Herb Alpert was partly responsible for the Sexual Revolution, “on account of the sensuality and lyricism of his many songs.”
“In a sense, you’re Herb Alpert’s daughter,” he says.
“Um, yuk,” I say.
My dad says that he was probably born 50 years too late and would’ve preferred an era where everybody mowed their own lawn and TV had just three channels, all in black and white.
“What’s black and white?” my sister asks him
“Those are the two primary colors,” says my brother.
“No, they’re not,” my sister shrieks.
“Well, they’re important, that’s all I know,” says my brother.
Once upon a time, Dad says, all of America’s entertainment options were in black and white. Then color TVs started coming out and ruined everything.
“Although ‘Laugh-In’ was pretty good,” says my dad.
“I also liked ‘Love, American Style,’ ” says my mom.
Oh-my-god, we are like a distant wing of the Smithsonian Institution, except there are no buses or group tours.
When I point this out, Dad says we are all very fortunate to live in a house with a sense of history, even if it’s a little twisted. Mom says he’s just trying to be provocative and get a rise out of me.
“Don’t let him get to you,” she says.
“Mom, he’s crazy!” I say.
“Yes, but he helped you move, didn’t he?” she reminds me.
Yeah, he’s good with that. I’ve moved, like, nine times in the last six years, on account of college and stuff. Meanwhile, I spend a lot of nights here at home, since my little brother is only 4 and does cute stuff all the time.
“He is soooooo adorable,” all my friends say.
“He got that from me,” says my dad.
Oh-my-God, did I tell you about this? You know that new lawn my dad is putting in out back? Well anyway, every morning he wakes up to find that raccoons have flipped over the sod to look for grubs and stuff. I guess what happens is that they get the munchies in the middle of the night, and wormy things taste good to them. Sort of like raccoon sushi. Yum.
“Varmints!” Dad says when he looks out each morning to see the sod all messed up.
“It’s us against them,” says my mom.
“You mean the kids?”
“No, the raccoons,” she says, and they stand at the back window staring out, wondering what they’ll do next.
I think that pretty much sums up parenthood, standing with an arm around each other and trying to figure out what to do next. I mean, I guess that’s a life -- 25 years of kids, bills, car repairs and curfews. Twenty-five years of varmints, with no end in sight. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock....
Me, I’m betting on the varmints.
Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com. For more columns, see latimes.com/erskine.
