On Consumerism: A Father’s Day memory

By ARTHUR VIDRO
By Arthur Vidro

“Eat all your food and someday you’ll grow up to be big and strong like your father.”

That is what most boys hear at some point or other.

But I tended not to eat all my food. Deep down, I did not want to become as big and strong as my father.

My father, Mel, was indeed a big guy. Tall, broad-shouldered, and barrel-chested. Though with thin, somewhat delicate legs.

I inherited his attractive legs (and his allergy to penicillin) but not much else.

At age 13, Mel was already six feet tall. At age 13, my brother was six feet tall. At that age, I was just reaching five feet in height.

Mel used to advise me in mock-seriousness that I should become a jockey.

The idea that someday I might be bigger than this big man made me uncomfortable. How could this big guy someday be smaller than me? How sad it would be if he shriveled up. Whether I got big or he got small, the concept of my being bigger than him seemed wrong. It would shatter my image of this massive man.

Yet, that is what happens in most families.

But not in my case. As an adult, I would have to reach upward to put my arm around his shoulder. He, though, would still casually drape an arm downward over my shoulder. Once, without his realizing it, his draped arm started to crush my windpipe. I couldn’t breathe and struggled to convey this to him. At times he didn’t know his own strength.

When he was in his late 60s and early 70s, he and mom would sometimes visit from Florida. To spare him the expense of renting a car, I would lend him mine. After all, it spent most of the day sitting unused in the company’s parking lot while I worked indoors. If necessary, I could get to work or home without it – just take a bus and a transfer.

It was an ordeal for Mel to lower and fold his huge body into my compact car. His head brushed against the inner roof. Every time he got in, he would glower at me and grumble, “This car is for midgets!”

Mel passed away in November 2017. He had been declining slowly but steadily for a few years. Parkinson’s disease. He was in a nursing home.

His last year or two he couldn’t walk. Couldn’t even propel his own wheelchair.

January 2017 was the final time I phoned his room and he picked up. After that, I had to hope someone else would be there to pick it up and hand it to him.

The ability to dial a phone had left him earlier.

His body gradually betrayed him. And in his final year, so did his mind. He didn’t always understand where he was, or why. Or remember that he couldn’t walk.

His mind worked better in the daytime than at night. One night when I reached him, he thought he had been transferred to a prison.

He was lucky to have mom around. She would drive to visit him, from right after her breakfast until his bedtime. Seven days a week. She was there so much, spreading cheer, some residents thought she was a volunteer social worker.

He was fortunate, too, to be in a good nursing home. They are expensive. But my brother had planned ahead, and during the good years had taken out a long-term care policy for our folks. So in case they eventually needed constant care – as happened with Mel – the policy covered it.

Most families don’t purchase long-term care policies. It is a form of insurance, in case something bad happens. You pay money you might prefer to have fun with. If something bad doesn’t happen, you might feel you have wasted that money.

But if something bad does happen, you would be lost without the policy.

In a way, I am glad Mel didn’t survive into the COVID-19 era. He would not have known what was going on, would not be allowed visitors, would not have mom there every day to talk to and explain things to him. He wouldn’t have anyone to hand him the telephone. He would have been isolated, unaware, and lost.

That would have been a tragic fate.

When feeding and hydration tubes are disconnected, the patient usually survives a day or two. But Mel had enough strength to linger for eight days.

When he finally passed away, Mel was still roughly six inches taller and one hundred pounds heaver than me. It makes me glad that even at the end, he was still so much bigger than me.

In October 2018, I replaced my old compact car with a newer one.

I wish I could watch my father clamber into it and hear him complain one last time.

If you have consumerism questions, send them to Arthur Vidro in the care of this newspaper, which publishes his column every weekend. His latest short story, “GLI or NOGT?”, appears in the June 2020 issue of Mystery Weekly Magazine.