Will's Dad left for his drive back to Texas yesterday morning.  His youngest sister is due to spend part of Monday and most of Tuesday (if not all) with us and then we will be company-free for a while.  Thank God.

After Will's Dad left I stood in my living room marvelling at the lack of sound.  Will's Dad is hard of hearing so he always turns up the television to top volume.  He also puts his cell phone on speaker, turns it up all the way and holds it to his ear.  Then, because it sounds to him like the people on the other end of the line are shouting, he starts shouting back.  I'm currently trying to figure out just how many cookies I need to make to offer up to my neighbors as apology gifts for our loudness over the last week.

I've been trying to come up with a way to describe the last week.  It wasn't all bad.  We took Will's Dad to the Aviation Museum in McMinnville, IKEA, Powell's, New Seasons Market, Voodoo Doughnuts, Hot Lips Pizza, and to a couple of movies, all of which he really enjoyed.  I think he might even like Powell's more than I do.  He also bought us the first four Harry Potter books in Hardcover from Powell's and a new bedspread that I've been coveting for months from IKEA.  It was good to show him how we can enjoy parts of the city without living right in it.

Where it got hard was trying to deal the different ways in which we approach life.  Imagine the stereotypical good ol' boy–racist, loves guns, hates towns with populations over 500, always has to be right.  Now imagine a stereotypical anarchist–hates all laws, wants to go live hundreds of miles away from everyone, wants to live completely off the grid, spends his time researching conspiracy theories, etc.  Now put them into the same person….who will not accept any point of view but his own as relevant or worth entertaining–and who thinks it is fun to poke at people and make fun of them and bully them in the hopes that they'll tell him he is right just so that he'll shut up.  His "debates" involve repeating his same points over and over in a louder voice until you give up and walk away.  Now imagine that this person can instantly change from laughing at something to deciding you're a worthless piece of crap in about two seconds for something that might have been completely beyond your control.  A tilt of the head (because of shower water that got stuck in your ear) can be taken as an insult.

Now imagine that person being in your home for a week.  I'm fairly sure that some of the things he said were just to piss me off in the hopes that I would take his bait and try to argue with him, but it was stressful nonetheless.  I was too scared to joke around with him for fear of pissing him off or having to endure a lecture on why I was wrong for whatever it was I said.  Instead I spent most of the week going "hmm" or talking about subjects so light and fluffy that I'm pretty sure my IQ has dropped a couple dozen points.

Will's Dad is not a bad guy.  He's just set in his ways and doesn't like how quickly the world is changing.  I get the feeling that somewhere inside he's hoping that if he just plants his feet and refuses to move or accept anything new that the world will turn itself backward on its axis just to accommodate him.  He doesn't like it when he doesn't have complete control over a situation and reacts badly when something doesn't go exactly the way he wanted it to go, which is something that we've all gone through ourselves at least once our twice in our lives.

Like I said, the visit wasn't all bad.  We went to some neat places and I am glad that he found so much to like in the area that Will and I hope to call home for the foreseeable future.  But I would be lying if I said I wasn't relieved to have our home back to normal for a couple of days.

I'd also be lying if I told you that I didn't spend the first few minutes after he left trying to decide which I wanted to watch more–West Wing (to undo all of the political crap I had to listen to) or Grey's Anatomy (as a healing measure after so many days of History and Discovery channel "boy" shows).  Finally I just decided to enjoy the quiet and then I took a nap.

September 7th, 2008 Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)