Father's Day

We spent Father's Day with my mom and dad having a cookout and watching my poor hip-replaced father trudge around with his cane. Hard to believe that the man who taught me to play HORSE and spent much of my childhood nailing drywall to the ceilings needs a titanium joint. The thought really creeps him out, so I pretended to listen near it and said I thought I could hear a scraping sound of metal on metal. I don't think he found the humor in it.

My mother uses any family occasion as one in which to indulge her incredible craving for beef of any sort. My father, for moral reasons, is a semi-vegetarian. He won't eat pork or beef since, apparently, pigs have the intellect of the average three-year-old. I say, show me their little hooves spelling their names and I will sincerely believe you, but for now I will just go with it. My mom and Dean and I try our very best to avoid these things as well, but my mother's Dutch heritage sometimes emerges and she just needs to sink her teeth into the nice juicy flesh of a big steak. Hearing that Dean is on the Atkins diet (his version of a semi-annual cleanse), she seized upon the opportunity to procure some nice T-bones. I must say, cows, you may be bad for the environment (though, if excessive flatulence were a problem for people, I know exactly which family member should be slaughtered) and you may wish to live your life in peace, but DANG you are tasty. My dad spent his meal delicately spearing his flaky salmon while the rest of us sunk our teeth into that salty, fatty goodness.

Susannah dug into not one, not two, but three pieces of leftover chicken lasagna. She comes by her hefty thighs honestly. She gets that from her mother.

 Susannah, using the incentive spirometer from my dad's hip replacement surgery.

Frankie was filled with pride over her card and gift to her dad. She painted a picture of herself and Dean and suspended it from a card filled with hearts and family portraits. It killed me to see her nervous anticipation and Dean's teary eyes. She also picked out a package of spicy jerky for him at the farmer's market and paid five dollars for it out of the forty-eight dollars that she has saved to purchase Go-Go the Walking Puppy- the toy of her dreams. I guess her dad was more important to her. Isn't that what love is all about?