"Your mother can't cook."
Apr. 28th, 2012 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
howeverbriefAs you might have gathered from my previous post, I stayed up way too late last night despite being exhausted. This lead me to forget that my dad might stop by in the morning to pick up the portable coffee maker my mom left behind. Low and behold, I got a phone call from my dad at 9:45 asking me if I was awake. Ha, whoops?
Well, we ended up going to breakfast at a dinky restaurant down the street, which was actually pretty pleasant. The conversation didn't stray far into politics (thank bog) but rather stayed fairly consistent around Ireland and old family stories. Stuff about his childhood (catching razor clams), first being in America (how a kid who was bigger than him took an eye dropper full of ink and sprayed it on his khakis, "And I wasn't going to take that! So I challenged him, and he was bigger than me!"), and the path his dad (a plumber, welder, and boxing champion) took to immigrate to the U.S. (a much more complicated story than I had heard before; apparently, he could have ended up in Canada and never met my mom).
My dad told me this story:
"Yeah, I used to ride my bike everywhere. My car broke, so I had to. You know, on some days, my dad would take me to work because, well, they were staying with me at the time. Anyway, on most of those rides, we wouldn't really talk because I was never really all that close to my father. Well, one day when it was raining, we pulled up to a light, and out of the blue, you know, out of nowhere, he turned to me and said, 'You know, your mother can't cook.' Haha! So I feigned surprise and said, 'Oh?' Trying to elicit a response. He went on to tell me a little more. I mean, my mother was a very educated woman. She was educated as a secretary, so she never knew how to cook. After they came back from their honeymoon, you know, my aunts lived down the street from her. So after my father left for work, she went to my Auntie Kit and asked what he liked to eat. She said, 'Steak.' So they went and got a steak, you know, a roast that would last for a few days, and she told my mother how to make it. Well, we had a really old turkish stove, and my aunt forgot to tell her to open the flue, so you know, the heat could actually get into the stove. So my father comes home after a twelve hour day, ravenously hungry, and of course, she goes to pull it out of the stove, and the meat is completely raw. And here he was, fifty years later, still talking about it."
These are the times I wish I knew how to ask the right questions. I get so wrapped up in avoiding politics and other topics that I forget there's still so much I don't know about him. Oh well. Such is life, I suppose. I'll take what I can get.
Well, we ended up going to breakfast at a dinky restaurant down the street, which was actually pretty pleasant. The conversation didn't stray far into politics (thank bog) but rather stayed fairly consistent around Ireland and old family stories. Stuff about his childhood (catching razor clams), first being in America (how a kid who was bigger than him took an eye dropper full of ink and sprayed it on his khakis, "And I wasn't going to take that! So I challenged him, and he was bigger than me!"), and the path his dad (a plumber, welder, and boxing champion) took to immigrate to the U.S. (a much more complicated story than I had heard before; apparently, he could have ended up in Canada and never met my mom).
My dad told me this story:
"Yeah, I used to ride my bike everywhere. My car broke, so I had to. You know, on some days, my dad would take me to work because, well, they were staying with me at the time. Anyway, on most of those rides, we wouldn't really talk because I was never really all that close to my father. Well, one day when it was raining, we pulled up to a light, and out of the blue, you know, out of nowhere, he turned to me and said, 'You know, your mother can't cook.' Haha! So I feigned surprise and said, 'Oh?' Trying to elicit a response. He went on to tell me a little more. I mean, my mother was a very educated woman. She was educated as a secretary, so she never knew how to cook. After they came back from their honeymoon, you know, my aunts lived down the street from her. So after my father left for work, she went to my Auntie Kit and asked what he liked to eat. She said, 'Steak.' So they went and got a steak, you know, a roast that would last for a few days, and she told my mother how to make it. Well, we had a really old turkish stove, and my aunt forgot to tell her to open the flue, so you know, the heat could actually get into the stove. So my father comes home after a twelve hour day, ravenously hungry, and of course, she goes to pull it out of the stove, and the meat is completely raw. And here he was, fifty years later, still talking about it."
These are the times I wish I knew how to ask the right questions. I get so wrapped up in avoiding politics and other topics that I forget there's still so much I don't know about him. Oh well. Such is life, I suppose. I'll take what I can get.
