Parents say the darndest things

I noticed, lately, that I tell people stories about my parents. I quote them in a funny anecdote the way other people do their children. I'll be doing it and then suddenly become very self-conscious and wonder, is this normal? Do other people do this? I don't think they do. Which brings me to my next question, why am I?

It's possible that I have tired of talking about myself, and am looking for something, I don't know, more removed to talk about. Everyone has parents so it could be that I'm seeking to strike a common chord. Again, much the way people with children do. Many of the people I know, in fact most, still don't have children and yet I don't notice them telling stories about their parents.

There's the obvious reason that they live close to me and I see them often. Another possible explanation is that until the last few years, I haven't been as emotionally connected to my parents as I am now. In fact, I might be going through some reverse process by which I become more attached to my parents as I get older, where other people become less. I also feel that I'm just getting to know them.

When we're kids, our parents intentionally keep certain things from us that reveal that they are human, they make mistakes and they were once children too. As they get older, my folks offer up these delicious little tidbits of their life. Just today, I was having lunch with my mom. She saw a girl and said "she's wearing bloomers." I looked and sure enough, she was. I don't think I've ever seen a person wearing bloomers in real life before - I mean, not in a costume. Then she said that she was wearing bloomers when she met my dad. Black bloomers with white polka dots and a baby doll type top.

"My hair was cut short", she said, "like yours." And then she told me a piece of the "how I met your father story" that I'd never heard before. It was really nice. Sometimes telling the stories are a way of sharing my own opinion, but from someone else's mouth. You see, I hear myself in them, and it amazes me that we are so similar.

My mom was talking about a new HBO show, I think that one about sex. She said "What's the fascination with bodies anyway? We all have one." I just about fell off my chair laughing and I'm not even sure it's that funny. It's that the thought seems so unique to me that hearing it from her mouth reminds me that we are related. That I made from her the way Eve is supposed to be made from Adam.

I spent quite a few years of my life not liking my parents very much, so it's an absolute treat to get to know them at this point in my life. While out to dinner with my dad, he was asking about my recent (and second) conversion to vegetarianism. "Is it for your health or because you want to save the animals?" he asked. I replied that it was for the animals and he laughed before he could stop himself. But I understood, I knew what it meant.

He was thinking that it can't possibly make a difference if I stop eating animals when he's going to have a bowl of sea creatures for dinner. But he's a smart man, and he knows I'm a smart woman so he gives it another think. I tell him that I have certain beliefs and things that are important to me and that at some point in a discussion about these things, someone will inevitably ask if I am vegetarian and I will have to be able to say "yes." He listened then said "In Peru, people throw trash out the car window." He told them that it was bad, that they shouldn't do it and they asked "why?" They looked at him with quizzical faces. That's what people do. He said that even though he couldn't change their mind, he thought it was important to be an example. He made the connection between my example, showing people that we can change, bringing awareness with my choices, and his own experience. I was really quite proud of him.

I think in a way, I'm kind of falling in love with my parents the way people do with their children. For me, I've found that it's a way of accepting myself. I am, after all, like them in so many ways. For me to love their quirks is to come to love mine.

Meet me on the farm

Last weekend, I visited my mom and she couldn't stop talking about the farm. She was so excited, she said, she could barely eat or sleep! The farm is undoubtedly theirs, I don't think that's the issue, it's that she's only four years away from retirement and this is truly a dream come true.

She's fantasizing about decorating the rooms in the cottage and building another house, all I'm thinking about is how my life just got a thousand times better. "The farm" (yet to be named) has just made us one of those fabulously cool families that has a place to convene, a plot of LAND!


We'll plant orchards and in the fall we'll have apple picking parties. We'll grow unusually large pumpkins and sit on benches made of hay, carving them. The kids can ride the miniature burros and we'll do apple bobbing. In the evening, we'll hang lanterns from the trees and drink the fresh apple-cider we made the day before, spiked of course. We'll have a local band come play and party late into the evening.

Christmas at the farm will be like no other. We'll decorate the giant pine trees on the property, dress up the miniature burros like reindeer and attach a sleigh to them. On Christmas morning the kids will wake up to their Opa dressed as Santa Claus bringing them presents. We'll make a puzzle in front of a roaring fire and listen to the surf pound the shores in the winter storms while carols play on the stereo.

When spring comes, we'll celebrate with a cocktail party on the lawn and play croquet like Alice in Wonderland except we won't invite the Red Queen. The orchard will be blossoming, the flowers blooming and the birds singing. We'll eat dinner at long tables with beautiful tablecloths and vases stuffed with colorful blooms.

We'll spend most of the summer on the beach or walking down to the local coffee shop. Maybe we'll make homemade ice cream like they do in the magazines! Tourists will come by the farm for organic produce, eggs and maybe some yarn we'll have made the winter before with the sheep's wool, hand spun and dyed (organic of course). The days will be long and we'll be barbecuing and playing games on the lawn until the sun melts into the ocean.

It may be four years before they retire, but the parties should begin tout de suite! N'est-ce pas?