Then and Now

It is sad and pathetic when your own parents can out-party you.

As Tim and I and my parents rang in the New Year, then toddled off to bed, exhausted, my father reminisced about how they used to spend the holiday, when he and my mother were our age.

Then:  Every year, my parents hosted the same six couples for dinner.  Per our Irish heritage, somewhere in the hour or so before they arrived, there was at least one really loud "discussion" about how much ice we needed for cocktails, whether the roast should be rare or well-done or how many different kinds of bread should be served with dinner.  All vitally important matters upon which the fate of the free world hung.

Now:  We don't eat red meat, we only eat whole grain bread, and the only one using ice is the dog, but she's a mean drunk, so we cut her off after one cocktail.

Then:  After a fairly raucous dinner, the midnight toast, and enough alcohol consumed to keep Charlie Sheen making YouTube videos until his kids are all old enough to collect social security, the real fun would start.  Charades. Boys against the girls.

The guys would stay in the TV room, while the girls retired to the living room to come up with their clues.  Dumb.  Dumb.  Dumb.  What were we girls thinking???  TV room???  Where the TV guide was???  Left to their own devices,  the guy's clues would have been easy to guess.  In those days, there were only three channels plus PBS, so how hard could it have been to guess all the sports shows?

But no, with access to information provided by the guide, they cheated their pants off.

"Oh ho!  You girls couldn't get Two Mules for Sister Sarah?   Starring Shirley MacLaine?  How could you not have come up with that one right away?    It's a classic.  And everyone knows Dora's Dunking Doughnuts featuring the always adorable Shirley Temple.  That one was a gift.   The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse is so a movie.  It stars Edward G. Robinson.  Gheesh.  You girls really should get out more."

We finally figured out how they were able to come up with a movie title besides Planet of the Apes, and began removing the TV guide earlier in the day when we were cleaning.  And that was the end of their vast movie knowledge.  Thank goodness they never tumbled to the fact that there was an entire set of encyclopedia in the room.  They might have actually won a game or two.

At first, we girls were coming up with book titles we were sure they hadn't read like Gone With the Wind, or The Old Man and the Sea, or musical groups like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, you know, obscure stuff.  After we thwarted their little crime ring however,  they had nowhere to turn but to the world of sports.  They began throwing at us the names of every athlete whose name exceeded eighteen letters, only one of which was a vowel.  In retaliation, we mined  my mother's knowledge of music and began throwing dead Russian composers at them.  That went over well.

As some of the arguments got fairly heated, it was a good thing that my parent's house was bordered on one side by woods and another by a cemetery.  Actually,  in retrospect, it was probably a miracle that on the first of the new year, we didn't have a crime scene unit scouring the woods and excavating a freshly dug grave.  It was also a miracle that the divorce rate among the couples didn't skyrocket.

Somewhere around 4am, after losing five or six games in a row, the sore losers, er I mean guys, would have sobered up enough to drive the girls home, then, we would all tumble into bed, hungover and exhausted.

Now:  Somewhere around 5pm, we began consuming our bodyweight in food, ending around 10pm when we threw ourselves in front of the TV and, realizing that with 800 channels, nothing good was on, flipped back and forth between American Pickers and the food network until 11;30.  At that point, we roused ourselves from our food-induced comas, wiped the sleep from our eyes, the drool from our chins and the crumbs from our sweatshirts and tried to stay awake until midnight.

No sooner had the ball dropped then we all dragged ourselves to the stairs, stumbled up them and tumbled into our beds, totally drained from our rigorous workout.  Fork to mouth.  Wipe mouth with napkin.  Repeat.  Paaaaartay!!! Woo-(four-letter word beginning with f)--hoo!

Yep.  That was a trip down memory lane I could have lived without.

I'm Late! I'm Late! I'm Late!

My parents came to visit this weekend on their way down to Florida, and it was like spending time with the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.

First of all, this was the first time they were taking the auto train from here to Florida, and my father had been reading about it on the Amtrak website. I am sooo glad we taught him to surf the net. Next time we have a brilliant idea like that, we should just slam our hands in a door repeatedly. It would be less painful.

"It says you can check in as early as 11:30," he started in on Saturday about fifteen minutes after they arrived.

"But the train doesn't leave until 4...on Monday,". I pointed out. "Why do you want to sit around the station for several hours?"

"I want to make sure we get the 7pm seating for dinner," he informed me, "otherwise, we'll be stuck eating at either 5 or 9."

"So it's first come, first serve?"

"I don't know, but I want to be there early, so we get the 7pm seating for dinner."

Okay. Got it. You want to eat at 7.

"I really want to get there early," he broached the subject again about an hour later. "5pm is too early to eat and 9 is too late."

"What time do they board?". Tim tried a different tack.

"2pm, but I want to make sure we get the 7 o'clock dinner seating," my father stressed.

"So you reserve dinner when you check in?" Tim tried again to clarify.

"I don't know, but 5 is too early and 9 is too late for dinner," said the rainman, er, my father.

"That's a long time to sit in the station," sometimes Tim didn't have the sense God gave a turnip.

Stop. Roll over and play dead. Give up. I tried to communicate telepathically with Tim, but had no more success getting him to listen to me that way than I have when I actually speak out loud to him.

"I'd go around 1," he offered, "otherwise, it'll be a really long day."

"I don't know," my father seemed to waver for a moment, but recovered. "I'd hate to get there too late to get the 7 o'clock seating."

He actually managed to not bring up the subject for at least another hour or two and then only 86 or 87 times more an hour for the next two days.

Each time, we tried to lure him off topic by steering the conversation toward some other aspect of the journey.

"So, does arriving early affect the order in which your car comes off the train at the end?"

"It says it doesn't because of the way they load them on, but it does affect whether you get the 7pm seating."

Shoot me.

"Do you want to order a Netflix movie so you can watch it on your iPad? They have wi-fi on board, right?"

"If we get the 7pm seating, we won't have time for a movie afterwards, so we'll just watch a TV show. That's why I want to get there early."

Shoot me now.

"What do they serve for dinner anyway?"

"I don't know. I couldn't find that on the website, but it says they have three seatings: 5, 7, or 9."

Okay, one bullet for the both of us. We'll stand really, really close.

And while my father was obsessed with getting to the train early on Monday, my mother was just as obsessed with getting to church early on Sunday.

"What time is mass?" she questioned on Saturday night.

"All different times. Sleep as late as you want, and we'll go from there," I told her.

She was up at 7.

"What's the mass schedule?" she wanted to know. "What time do we have to leave? I don't want to be late."

We decided on 10:30 mass at a church less than five minutes away. Rose offered to drive, so at 10:10, my mother decided that Rose was late and she would wait outside for her.

"It's kind of breezy and chilly," I warned, "why don't we just watch out the window?"

"She might park the car and get out before we can get to the door, and then we'll be really late."

Okay, you and dad need to get either a hobby or a prescription for an incredibly powerful drug.

"It's 10:17," she fretted as we stood at the bottom of the driveway getting blown apart. "I don't want to be late."

"I know, but the church is less than five minute away," I tried to soothe her.

"It's 10:20, we're going to be late," she pronounced exactly three minutes later.

Maybe a hobby and a drug.

"It's 10:22. We'll never make it on time."

Hobby, drug and smash the watch.

Fortunately, Rose arrived at 10:25, just as I was getting ready to perform CPR...on myself because my blood pressure shot up sixty points every time Big Ben ticked off another second.

I am happy to say that my mother was not late...much.

I wish I could say the same for my father. Sadly, by the time he stopped for gas on the way to the train, he was late. They were stuck with the dreaded 5pm dinner slot.

"I told you so," he pouted over the phone. "I knew I should have been here early. Now, we'll have too much time to kill just sitting around after dinner."

As opposed to the time sitting around before? I wanted to, but I didn't say it.

Hobby, drug, gun, one bullet.