Visiting with Mom and Dad

My mom wanted me to get some stuff for her and grandma at Micheal's, if I was going to Micheal's anyway. I wasn't going anyway, or at least, I probably wouldn't be going there anyway on Friday or Saturday. Assuming that she was wanting something in the after-Thanksgiving sales ad, I probably wouldn't be going there anyway. If it was something that she really needed and she couldn't go get it herself, maybe I could be convinced to go there anyway, but it had better be something that she really wanted very badly to get me to go over by the mall the weekend after Thanksgiving if I wasn't planning to go that direction anyway, which I was not.

If it wasn't something on the sale ad, and it could wait til Monday or Tuesday, I would be happy to do it.

But of course it was something that she wanted in the ad, and she just really didn't get it that I wasn't going to be going there anyway. I have no money to spend at Micheal's at the moment, so why would I be going there anyway. It isn't too far away from school, so I could go there after school one day, but there is no school Friday or Saturday this week, so I wouldn't be just in the area for that either. And my plans for Black Friday were in the opposite direction.

She just almost seemed to get mad. Like I go to Micheal's everyday except when she asks me to go, and then I make up other plans that prevent me from going to Micheal's. I had been to school on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday that week, and if she wanted something enough to pay full price for it, she could have asked me before school on any of those days and I would have gone. But she didn't ask me until Wednesday evening, and she did want a sale item, and I just didn't think that I could fit that into my schedule.

By Thursday she had calmed down, and after lunch on Thanksgiving she showed me the ad and want she wanted from it. And there on the ad it said that they would be open on Thanksgiving from 6pm-9pm, and there were even coupons to use only at that time. So my mom decided that she could drive there herself on Thanksgiving, and that if I would meet her at her house we could go together and I could help her pick out some things.

Okay, so far as I know, the only places open to shop on Thanksgiving were a few drugstores and Garden Ridge, and now Micheal's was going to be open for three hours. So I figured that Garden Ridge would be crowded off and on throughout the day, and that during the 6pm-9pm sale that Micheal's would be really crowded. So if I needed something from this sale I would have been there well before 6pm and in line before the store opened.

My mom calls a bit before 5:30 to see if I'm ready to go. I am. This is just about perfect timing for me to drive to her house and then for us to get to Micheal's just before 6pm. Only when I get to her house she isn't quite ready to go, and she's on the phone for a little bit, and then she's looking at her hair and such, and she wants to ask me a few things that have nothing to do with going to Micheal's. Can't this stuff wait?

My mom doesn't see why we should be in a rush. It is Thanksgiving, and she doesn't think that many people will be out shopping, especially this late in the day. So we don't leave her house until 6pm, and then she doesn't want to get on the freeway, so we don't get to the place until about 6:30.

By that time most of the people have what they came to get and are already in line for the checkout. The lines are really long. The best that I can hope for is that either my mom will totally change her mind and decide that some of the stuff can wait, and maybe one of the drugstores will have something similar to the little Christmas tree that she wanted and we'll just leave, or else maybe she has a lot of shopping to do and maybe the lines won't be so long by the time she's done.

So she looks for the little Christmas trees that she came after, but she doesn't find them. Well, if they were that great of a deal, then maybe they are sold out already. All these other people got here at six if not sooner. Maybe all the good stuff is just gone.

My mom tries again to look for the Christmas trees while I go off to look at yarn. I have a coupon, but I don't think that it is worth standing in that line to use it. But I look anyway.

My mom finds the advertised trees, but they look nothing like the picture. She doesn't want them. I put the yarn back on the shelf.

But we don't leave yet, because my mom wants to look at something else. Someone made some jewelry for my sister, and my mom wants something like it. But my mom really can't describe what is it that we are looking for, and there's like three aisles of that stuff to look through. She keeps saying that we should look at my sister's stuff (which we cannot do right then because she did not borrow my sister's stuff to bring for comparison), so that should be the end of it but somehow we keep looking. And my mom has trouble with the most basic of descriptions, so we get nowhere.

So neither of us buys anything, and I get home about three hours after I left.

I have now seen my sister's jewelry, which looks almost nothing like the stuff that my mom was looking at.

A few nights ago I had a dream about my dad. My dad was going on a business trip, and he had one of those free companion flight tickets, so I was going to go with him. I was getting to go instead of my mom, because in the dream my siblings were still kids and couldn't be left at home without her. This made perfect since in the dream, but it doesn't quite add up in real life logic. If this were happening in real life at a time when we were younger and the kids couldn't be left home alone, then there would have been several live and healthy grandparents to look after them for a week or so.

So my dad and I are at the airport and are going to get our bags checked and all of that, and the rest of the family is there to see us off. And then something bad happens, and I'm not really clear on what it was, only that in the dream I was very scared so it was like a serious accident or terrorism or something like that. And then my dad calls someone at work, and his plans totally change, and we're going to be on a different flight and maybe even we are now going to a different place. And with all of this stuff happening I get very upset and start thinking that maybe I don't want to go. And I think I say something about not having packed the right clothes for where we are going, but what I'm really thinking is something more like I want my mommy. And my dad says that we can buy a few things once we get there if I still want to go. And he's saying how that he doesn't like to waste money, but we aren't poor, and that just this once we can spend a bit of money on things that we really don't need.

And then he has this idea that we really do have money, and that just this once, we should spend some. We are all at the airport, and we should all go, even though most of us haven't even packed to go on a trip. Dad has decided to buy the extra tickets and to even buy everyone some new clothes once we get to where we are going. We could all just get on the plane and go.

Even in the dream it isn't quite that easy. Mom didn't park the car in a space for people who are going to away for the week. Stuff like that. There's a lot of rushing around and such. I think I woke up before we got on the plane.

In real life my dad has been dead for almost five years now. So when I woke up I had one of those days that I really missed having my dad around.

My dad had cancer. For almost a year I got used to the idea that he had cancer and that he might die. He had some treatments, which didn't do as much for him as the doctors hoped, but they did make him a bit better. The doctors told him he needed an operation, which my dad really did not want, but he wasn't ready to give up and die either. And whenever someone has an operation, there's always the chance that something will go wrong and the patient will die on the table, or that the doctor can't finish the operation, or that the operation itself goes well but that there's more cancer and the patient ends up dying anyway. That sort of thing. For many months I got used to the idea that he might die because of that sort of thing.

What I did not imagine is that the operation would be a success and that the cancer would all be removed, but that the stress of the whole cancer thing would cause heart problems and that he would end up dying two months later. So even after all that time of thinking that my dad might die, it was still a bit of a shock. He wasn't supposed to die then, after the doctors had all said that he was cured.

A few months after that we went to see The Butterfly Effect, which I really think is a great movie. And I'm one of those people who might cry just a little bit at a movie theater, but not like a cry out loud cry that would disturb the people sitting next to me, but more of a quiet cry or mostly just my eyes tearing up a bit. So The Butterfly Effect has a lot of moments where your eyes get wet. It also has very disturbing moments and violence and all of that, and there are moments when you might actually feel a bit sick. But at the end of the movie my eyes were a bit wet again. And we didn't just jump up and run for the door. And while the credits roll by I wait for my eyes to dry. And I think I'd like to tell my dad about this movie, and then I realize that I can't do that, cause he's dead. So then I just become a blubbering idiot right there in the theater while everyone else walks past us.

I didn't break down like that too much when he died, and I think that time in the theater was probably the worst of it, maybe even worse than at the hospital or the funeral. I know he's in a better place and all of that, and I even think that he was ready to go. But sometimes it is damned annoying that I cannot ask him stuff, and that I can't talk to him about the "Hobbit" fossils and hear what he thinks about it.

It was kind of nice to see him at the airport, even if it was just a dream.