An Open Letter to Parents

I’ve just finished eating dinner. It is Friday night, and here I am blogging. I’ll be honest, I don’t mind so much. Some might feel slightly pathetic, but I just miss all of my friends and family a little.



For dinner I had a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, but it didn’t fill me up as much as I'd hoped. In order to top off my appetite, I had a pimento cheese spread rollover.



When I was a kid my Dad ate things like peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, cereal, and the like for supper all the time. I haven’t lived with him in years, but I would be willing to bet that he still does it too. He also ate pimento cheese rollovers pretty often.



Like any son, I wanted to try whatever my Dad did, so I made one once. The first time I tried pimento cheese spread, I immediately wished that I had been born without a tongue so that I might have never developed the ability to taste. It was awful. Disgusting. I never wanted to eat it again.



Yet here I am on a Friday night, happily stuffed after a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich that I chased with a pimento cheese spread rollover; both of which I really enjoyed.



Now that I’m writing this, I am also noticing that when I stop to think about the next sentence I want to write, I begin to twirl the hair in my beard as if the answer is caught in there somewhere. I can remember sitting in the living room of the house that my father helped to build (rather than buy) watching an Atlanta Braves baseball game on television , and noticing that he was sitting there the entire time twirling his beard.



Years later I watched him do it again as I helped him build a set of book shelves that I asked for. We reached a point in the building which required a moment to stop in order to rethink our initial plan. While we thought, he twirled and I just sat there because I knew whatever answer he came up with would be the best solution to the problem.



That’s my Dad ladies and gentlemen. There are a number of situations that I would feel no fear of being in, as long as I found myself in them with him. I’ve never met anyone else who is so logical and reasonable when faced with a problem.



Well I say never, but my little brother is exactly the same way. I admire that quality in both of them. No matter what puzzle or question of logic you throw at either of them, they will both sit down and think it over until the answer has been obtained. This is especially true if they can work it out together. I can just picture the two of them sitting there; my Dad twirling his beard and my brother with his tongue jetting out over his lips just slightly, as if his brain would stop working if that tongue were forced back into his mouth.



I think on a certain level we all begin to turn into our parents eventually. I begin to see this pretty clearly tonight and I am glad for it. My Dad has a number of traits that I will be happy to grow into.



There are plenty of his traits that I’m sure I may never grow into, like the need to have the most efficiently drained yard in town after a particularly heavy rain. But I would not mind so much if years from now I find myself sitting down next to my Dad, each of us eating a bowl of cereal with the tiniest drop of milk caught in our beards just beneath the bottom lip. Afterward we might sit out on the porch for hours chewing on unlit Swisher Sweets cigars, talking about the weather and twirling our beards until dawn.