 wdevoe, Thu, June 11th, 2009 Despite what they say, you can go home again. If you have parents like mine, however, you may not survive the experience. In the course of purchasing what will be our first home, my family had to move in with my parents for a couple months. It really hasn’t been that bad, all things considered, and we really appreciate them taking us in while we’re homeless, but it has made me think of the vast difference between being a parent and being a grandparent. First of all, my five-year-old, Kevin, and his 18-month-old brother, Nathan — two of the most low-down, crooked and ill-tempered rapscallions that have ever lived — can do no wrong in their grandparents’ eyes. Things that used to land my brother and me in the brig (our room) for weeks at a time when we were growing up are now shrugged off without a thought. Nathan breaks a plate? He’s just being a kid. Kevin gets a stain in the rug? He’s just being a kid. Kevin and Nathan manage to start the snow-blower and mow down the neighbor’s hydrangeas? Well, they’re just being kids. When I was growing up, if I so much looked at my father’s expansive collection of tools without first asking his permission, I was immediately sent to my room. The other day, My father and I went down to the basement to find Kevin beating on a 30-year-old Milwaukee power drill with a ball-peen hammer. I saw color coming to my father’s face. Now he’s done it, I thought, and I have to admit I was perversely pleased at the thought of my son receiving some sort of punishment for something that surely would have landed me in military school if I’d done it as a kid. But then my father turned to me…and he was smiling! “He’s going to be a little Bob Vila,” he beamed. “He’s a smart one.” “He sure is,” I said. What else could I? I am also learning that things that are considered parenting taboos today, weren’t considered so when my mother and father were bringing up their children. The other day, Nathan was walking around the house, screaming his face off. He does this from time to time, just to check the acoustics, I think, or to see if he can shatter a wine glass. I’m not sure. He staggers into the kitchen, where he knows he will get sympathy from his mother and grandmother. They’re suckers. “I think his teeth are bothering him,” I say to them. “You could rub some anisette on his gums,” my mother says to me, talking about the licorice-flavored liqueur. “That used to calm you and your brother down.” “You want me to get my 18-month-old son so drunk he won’t be able to feel his own teeth? And you used to do that to me and Dan? No one ever called Social Services on you when I was growing up?” “Well, let’s see if something sweet will cheer him up,” my mother says and she heads for the refrigerator. “His teeth are bothering him and you offer him liquor and candy? How did I make it out of this house alive?” My mother appears with a plate of brownies that she probably baked for the kids at 3 o’clock in the morning so my wife and I wouldn’t know about it. “He really can’t have those brownies,” my wife, Jess, says. “We don’t know if he’s allergic to nuts or not.” “He’s not allergic to nuts,” my father pipes up from his recliner in the family room. “How are you so sure?” I asked. “I’ve been feeding him peanuts for the past three weeks and he hasn’t complained yet.” Food is key in the DeVoe household — always has been, always will be. My mother came straight off the boat from Italy and takes great pride in her cooking ability. When I was growing up, all the neighborhood kids used to gather on the porch of the house I find myself in now if they knew she was making lasagna. If it weren’t for pasta, I wouldn’t have had any friends growing up. No one really knows where my father came from. One of his friends, when I was very young, told me my father crawled out of the primordial soup eons ago, just as grumpy and ornery as he is now, and waited around for my mother to come along in order to have someone to grow old with. Other people have told me he’s from Crescent. In any case, my father was born — I believe, anyway — with no proclivity toward cooking other than that he would enjoy experimenting on his children. When I was about 6-years-old and my brother was 12, my mother went to Florida for a week to visit family. We had in our kitchen an ugly, burnt orange, plastic Rolodex-like container with recipe cards inside of it. I believe it came with the set of encyclopedias we owned and was never opened until my mother left on her trip. My father randomly selected seven cards from the case, and decided that he would fix these dishes for dinner every day my mother was gone. Most of the dishes were nothing special — turkey pot-pie, chicken and dumplings, things like that. But on Saturday, the day before my mother was to come back, he pulled out a recipe that he described as “exotic.” He rattled off the list of ingredients, like he did for the six nights before, and I remember hearing hot dogs, cumin and beet juice in there somewhere, among other ingredients I have since forgotten or my mind has blocked out to preserve my own sanity. My brother realized it was going to be awful before I did: “There’s no picture on the recipe,” he whispered to me, sounding somewhat scared,. “All the other cards had a picture on it, but there’s no picture on this one.” As my father worked, the kitchen became a place of terrible smells. It wasn’t long before my father realized that this wasn’t going to be the most palatable of dishes, either, but he was — and still is — a firm believer in not wasting food, so he pressed on. Finally, my father spooned a thin, brown gruel into three bowls. He double-checked the recipe and added pieces of the well-seasoned hot dogs to the watery mess. “OK,” he said, “let’s eat.” My brother I sat there, each waiting for the other to try it first. Even my father reluctantly dipped his spoon into his bowl and stirred it around a little. When he brought it back up I expected it to be a burnt nub like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He slowly put it to his lips, then into his mouth… “Holy —” he choked before he could swear in front of my brother and me. What he said next, I will never forget: “This crap tastes like rotten onions stuffed into the bowels of a dead man. Don’t even try it, boys, let’s get a pizza.” These days it’s nice to see him have that same sense of camaraderie with my sons. Even if he’s teaching my 5-year-old minor curse words and my 18-month-old how to make coffee, even if my mother is trying to get my sons drunk for medicinal purposes or feeding them well after they’ve had enough to eat, it’s good for them to have that quality time with their grandparents. CATEGORY: Humor
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