Every time the older grandson, now 11, is around for a meal at our place, he and my wife refresh their dispute over whether the noon and evening meals should be called lunch and dinner or dinner and supper.
I find it entertaining. But I’m also hoping Artificial Intelligence can help me, because in my exhaustive online search of religious gift shops, I’ve yet to find a neatly framed cross-stitch of the Gospel verse: “And Jesus said to the throng gathered for the fishes and loaves: ‘Will y’all just shut up and eat?’”
The family argument over dinner and supper abates only when it’s time for me to pick up whatever food they want. By this time, the 7 -year-old grandson has had time to decide which his favorite food groups he’ll be having for dinner: Cheez Its or M&Ms.
And it’s just when I’m about to fetch the food that the three of them strengthen their ties by turning on me.
Before my brain even asks me where my wallet is, my wife pipes up with: “Grandpa, do you know where your “brown (or black) thing is?”
It’s become an issue of color because she refuses to acknowledge the word “wallet.” And, like every husband who imagines himself to be hen-pecked, I take the load road and refuse to accept the word billfold, which she prefers, as a synonym.
My principled stance is anchored in the international community’s longstanding tradition of refusing to officially recognize a country that’s everybody’s talking about but somehow saying they don’t want to recognize. In logic class it’s called Monkey Not See, Monkey not Do.
A future theater major, the older grandson ends the “brown thing” argument with another with a shot across my bow. “Grandpa, don’t you think you should find your keys first?”
Because it would make me seem an even smaller person than I am, I stop myself from blurting out: “My keys must be wherever Grandma put them the last time she reorganized my life.”
But the next time the gang of three turns on me, I may split the coalition by suggesting the whole “billfold” thing is the result of her repeatedly being run over by reindeer. The boys will love that one.
For those who keep score — as we always do — the longest running dispute of what our “48 wonderful years” of our marriage — said in unison when our eyes meet — began somewhere in the mid 1970s. That’s crucial, which means it has been with us during 1,000-year periods of human history or millennia.
That dispute involves the height of a chicken statue that stands on the east side of Ohio 127 a few miles south of Coldwater.
We’ve passed the thing 1,000 times on visits there and seldom pass up the opportunity to reminisce over our small-mindedness.
I call this one the Poultry Geist argument, because poultry is involved and the statue is in an area of Ohio dominated by the descendants of German immigrants, some who have the words “geist” or “geis” in their last names.
I was but a rash 20-something when I estimated the size of the statue at 10 feet, which my wife immediately declared to be crazy. To quote Billy Joel, I confess “she may be right.” But for political reasons, I decided to fake offense because her tone of voice seems to shout rather than merely say “idiot.”
My traditionalist view is that our wedding vows demand that she address me as “Mr. Idiot.” I also can proudly report that it only took me only 30 years to come up with the perfect retort to our size matters disagreement: “Honey, if that that thing walked through the door right now, you’d be the first one calling the cops.”
It’s the approach I’ve taken because I’m not sure my dad could have beat up hers – and I’m quite sure she would call me on it.
I bring all this up now in the name of family harmony.
We all know summer is the season in which we get to spend more time with family, so it provides more opportunities for us to engage in inane arguments, barring fisticuffs, produce the most treasured family memories.
Which brings me my final point, which I offer with the utmost gratitude all who still imagine I might have a legitimate point to make.
I grew up in what historians now call the B.W. period, Before Wal-Mart.
As a result, my high school yearbook did not ask upcoming graduates which person in the graduating class we’d most like to go to Wal-Mart with. It’s a question most high school principals might tolerate for the five years before someone tells that built into the question is the high schooler’s assumption that the point of taking someone to Wal-Mart would be to leave them there.
Not so.
On my latest visit to my mother in Chicago, we named one another as the person we’d most like to Wal-Mart together.
This is so even though when her walker and my cart are in the same aisle, the aisle feels like the Dan Ryan Expressway; despite the high anxiety we both suffer when I abandoned her to make sure neither one expires of old age exploring the acreage; and despite my own talent for finding store associates in Chicagoland who cheerfully offer me the same greeting: “No English.”
I’m proud to say that Mom and I found almost everything on the list in record time; that we extended our hot streak at a discount shoe store, where I edged ahead of my brother as favored son by finding shoes that fit her; and that we celebrated with a lunch at our Culver’s, our traditional go-to place after we’ve gone to Wal-Mart.
All of which has led this Simple Tom to this cross-stitch able conclusion: That the time we spend together with one another in the summer is likely more important than what we’re actually doing.
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