Wednesday, May 22, 2013

i Love Those Stories

A distraught customer brought me into her dining room and showed me the damage.  Apparently the brush her elderly husband had used to polyurethane the trim had previously been used for painting something white.  The effect he had achieved is sometimes called "pickling," ghostly white streaks all over the dark, wood casings and chair rails that can only be removed by sanding everything back to bare wood and starting over.  She was less than reassured.  In fact, she was mortified.

"Every time we have someone over, the dinners, I just want to die," she confessed in a conspiratorial whisper even though her husband can barely hear you if you yell in his face.
"Well, just invite over people you like," i quipped because my go-to response to other people's agony is poor humor.
"Oh, it's only ever family, my children."
"Then they don't care," i assured her, "someday it'll be just another funny story about Dad."
She heaved the sigh of someone carrying the world, "There are too many of those stories."

It didn't occur to me right away, these things rarely do, that's why i'm a writer and not a great conversationalist.  i just lost a man i called Dad last year, my wife's father.  A man i'd known and loved since i was fifteen.  One thing has become clear to me since then.

There are never enough stories about Dad.