Blast from the past: Father visiting me at work

Hosea's log, star date ... gosh, I don't even remember. This must have been somewhere between 2000 and 2002 -- so, a good five to seven years before I ever started this blog. I was working at a different big company from the one where I work today. I was also a lot fatter than I am now. (Well, maybe I should say somewhat fatter. Once upon a time I had lost a lot of that weight but I've gained some of it back.) I was in my early forties; my dad was in his mid sixties. It was a while ago.    

Anyway, one weekend my dad drove up to visit because he wanted to talk to me. He and I did most of our communication by email because over the years Wife and I had discovered that he was kind of problematic as a house guest: self-centered and demanding, loud and socially clueless. But whenever he wanted to discuss something that he didn't want to put in writing, it was either a phone call or a visit. And this time he had prepared a speech, so it had to be a visit.

I assume my mom must have come along too, though I don't remember any of the frame story well enough to say for sure. Probably she did, and probably they took a hotel room. Anyway, when they got to the house he asked if there was somewhere private we could go to talk. It was Saturday, so I said we could go to my office at work. Nobody would be there, and if there were anyone I'd have the door closed which would preserve our privacy. So we drove over to the office and I let us in. He stopped to remark on a bunch of stuff I had written up on my whiteboard, all about whatever issue had been keeping us busy the day before and none of which he understood. I never really discussed my work with him (not out of secrecy but because I learned after a while that he never ever remembered what I said or understood it, so I always had to start over with the A-B-C's) ... so I just waved my hand and said, "Yeah, that's what I do all day. It's a lot of fun." (You would never know it from reading this blog; but when I'm not here whining to you about my job -- in other words, most of the time -- I actually enjoy it.) He said he was glad to hear that I enjoyed my job, and then he got down to business.

Turns out he wanted to talk about his health and mine. As for his health ... I forget if this was before or after his quadruple-bypass surgery, which he had on an emergency basis because he had a heart attack in his cardiologist's office while he was there for a routine visit. If it was after, then of course he started by talking about the bypass surgery. If it was before, then he started by talking about his heart condition and his nitroglycerine pills. But either way the point was that this had all been caused by his being too damned fat, and he was worried about me getting just as fat. 

I mean, ... it seems like my dad was always fat, though I have looked at pictures of him when I was a young kid and by comparison he was merely pudgy -- certainly a lot thinner than he later became. But the first time that I ever remember thinking he was thin was when he was in the hospital in June 2015, a few months before he died.

Now what, you might be wondering, was the need for all the secrecy? It was no secret that he had heart troubles. It was no secret that he had bypass surgery. It was no secret that I was pretty fat too, at that point -- that I probably ate and drank as much as he did. And so it would be only logical for him to pass along a warning of some kind. Why the need for a face-to-face conversation in a private place?

Well it turns out that from his perspective the most horrible consequence of his weight and heart condition was not that it almost killed him but that it made him impotent.

Death might have been bad but apparently impotence (in his book, at any rate) was far worse.

And he described in some detail how difficult his weight had made their sex life (his amd my mom's). He said they found they had to use the same positions they had invented back when she was pregnant, in order to reach. (He didn't give the exact gymnastic details, but I suppose I can imagine.) And then when his dick wouldn't respond any more, he went to the urologist who ended up prescribing some kind of medicine that had to be injected with a needle ... and he complained that nothing was so humiliating as to ask his wife (my mom, obviously) to inject medicine into his dick in the vain hopes that he could get hard and satisfy her. He also went on about how helpless and useless he felt at not being able to make love to her any more.

This was not pleasant to listen to, and I didn't comment or ask any questions. But afterwards there were a few questions that did occur to me. (To be absolutely clear, I still never asked them -- not in person and not by email, not then and not later. This is not a conversation I wanted to revisit. But I also was not satisfied with his analysis of the situation.) 

The first thing I wondered was, "Why were you getting injections instead of taking Viagra?" I just now checked Wikipedia, and Viagra was released in 1998. By the time of this conversation, he should have been able to get his hands on some. Maybe he was describing something that had happened years before, though, before it was available. I don't know for sure.

The second thing I wondered -- and this is a question I was really never going to ask him! -- was, "You talk about wanting to satisfy Mom, and about being humiliated that you can't. But what does that have to do with getting hard? Really, dude, is that all you know how to do? Have you never heard of fingers and tongues? What the hell?" Again, to be clear, at this point I had been absolutely faithful to Wife for almost twenty years, ever since we had first gotten together a year before we married. This means that I was still at best a bland and mediocre lover. I had not been with D, I had not been with Debbie, and because Wife and I communicated so badly about sex I had learned very little about the different ways to entice and excite and satisfy a woman in bed. And I'm sure that I still know only a small fraction of what there is to be learned ... but it is enough, now, that Marie gives me compliments which are way over-the-top. And I know a lot more now than I knew back on the day of this conversation. And even then, with the dull, very vanilla, mostly mechanical knowledge I had then, I couldn't understand why getting his dick hard was so damned important for satisfying her. 

Important for his own pride? Sure, I get that. If you grow up with a certain idea of what it means to be a man, then yes that is going to matter to you a whole hell of a lot. And if you were born in the 1930's and came of age in the 1950's -- like my dad -- those are the messages you internalized. If you spend your whole life trying to figure out what role people expect you to play and then playing it -- rather than shit-canning all that crap and trying your best to live a real life as yourself -- then playing the part of a suave man of the 1950's or early '60's, a Frank Sinatra or a Dean Martin or any of those other callous, charming cads, effortlessly erect and insouciantly fucking their way through waves of "dames" ... that's maybe what you figure you have to do. That's what everyone used to tell you a real man was supposed to be like -- they don't say it quite the same way any more, but my dad stopped listening some time in the 1960's -- and so it's really important to you.

But really important to her? Really? Dude, there are so many other things you can do. I totally agree that you want to satisfy her as much as you possibly can. But she's a girl, and that gives you so many possibilities.

I'm sure this object lesson was intended to scare the crap out of me. But honestly it distracted me from his main point. I never brought up the subject again. I never told him that the understanding of sexual possibilities contained in that little speech was cramped and small. But it was.

All the same, I suppose I should start eating and drinking less, before it catches up with me. That was the real point of it all ... right?
       

Old news

I was looking through some notes to myself, and found a couple of things that could easily have been blog posts but never were. So I just typed them up, and gave them retrospective dates. They are now embedded back in the timeline for 2019.

March 21, 2019, "Dreaming of Inga."

May 3, 2019, "I want out."

Happy reading.
   

Dreaming of my mother

Last night I dreamt that my mother came to the door of my house, or of some house where I was living. (You remember that right now I live in an apartment.) It was great to see her. I gave her a big hug and brought her in. She looked young, like she did all the years when I was growing up, and she started describing some kind of car trouble she had just had on the way there. She sat down on the living room sofa and we talked.

Then Brother came to the door. He didn't seem to see her at all, or notice her in any way; and he started talking to me about how we had to clear out all of her things by the end of the month unless we wanted to pay for the next month too. I asked him why this was so urgent and kept looking over at her on the sofa, seemingly blocked out of the conversation. And somewhere in there I started to wake up.

As dreams go, this one was disturbingly easy to read. So I texted Mother this morning and she texted back. She's fine -- busily working (at home, not at the office) and wondering why her clients put off everything to the last minute and then want her to do it all by magic overnight. She also started to ask if maybe we could think about getting together in a socially-distanced way for the Fourth of July. In short, she's fine.

But I had to check.
    

I may be getting sick

You know that I have had a cough all spring. (See, e.g., here and here.) I haven't known what it is, but I've been sure it's not COVID-19. But today for the first time I detected a real sore throat. Also I just ... feel a little funny, in ways that I can't quite articulate because I'm not sure they are clear enough that I can say for sure it's not my imagination. My skin feels just a little more sensitive than normal, as if I might be coming down with a fever. And my head has felt alternately very tired and, after a little coffee, just a little light-headed. 

Just a little. Almost negligibly. But that's how things start, isn't it?

Of course it figures that today would be the day I actually went into the office for four hours instead of staying completely at home. And I have no idea where I might have caught it. From my new neighbor? Maybe, ... I guess ...? Or from going out a couple days ago to do laundry? Or from going out a couple weeks ago to do grocery shopping? Or from going out any number of times to get a little walk in, because I've done almost nothing by way of exercise since the social distancing started in February? Or ... well, hell, I have no idea.

The key thing will be to see how I feel tomorrow. Get a good night's sleep tonight and then check ... do I feel worse, or better? I don't own an illness thermometer, but maybe I can ask my downstairs neighbors to get me one and I can reimburse them. 

I guess we'll see. Cross your fingers and hope for the best.

Oh, by the way, I've been posting more philosophical stuff over on the Patio, in case you are interested. It includes a reflection inspired by the current unrest sweeping across our cities. Take a look if you like.

[Update added a few days later] P.S. No, it wasn't COVID. Just a sore throat. Dust or pollen or something. That's all. It was gone by the next day.