I turned my mom's SUV into her driveway, pulling it close to the Floridian plant just ahead in the front yard.
"Ooh, not quite so close," she said, from the passenger seat.
"I was taught to pull it up close," I said, remembering how Papa had specifically coached me in how close to get that vehicle to that plant, leaving plenty of space behind for another medium-large vehicle to pull in and not cover any of the sidewalk.
Mama huffed and said, "And you took that advice from a man who was so intent on getting 'flush up against' a woman's garage that he broke a hole in her brick wall."
"Mama, that was decades ago," I remarked.
"You remember it happening?" she said.
"No, I remember the STORY."
Papa could tell stories about his most embarrassing moments with flair. Mama preferred telling bicultural jokes. But that was back decades ago, too, I guess, considering that I am now 38 . . . a long time ago.
We lived in Japan back then, when Papa's famous culture shock stories involved him taking a package to mail into a BANK, assuming that it was the post office - which of course, it was not. And he would describe how the people behind the counter murmuring back and forth, glancing at him until one gentleman was apparently chosen to bear the bad news. Nowadays, I think they might have had someone who could speak English in there, but this guy simply placed his hands on the counter and said, "Kore wa ginko~ desu."
Ooh . . . my dad had recently studied the topic of places in town, and now he realized that he actually had studied: "Ginko~ means bank." And I don't know whether he also knew the word for post office, but it happens to be you~binkyoku, which sounds nothing like ginko~.
Yeah, embarrassing stories were in Papa's line, as long as he was the one being embarrassed. And the "flush up against" thing really did happen.
He sort of got past that, but just the other day, he was very kindly driving me to the eye doctor, because you know, you can't go to the eye doctor alone, or so they say. If your eyes have a problem, you shouldn't be driving, right? So we get up there, and he LOVES dropping people off at the door - if there's any possibility of that. And so he drives up, and there's a fence right beside my door, so I cannot open my door more than 3 inches or so, and right in front of us is a car. And we're thinking, okay, somebody's going to come out and hop in her car, and she'll drive forward, and we'll pull up.
And so she just stayed there. And we stayed and sat and waited, and Papa's starting to fidget and get irritated - which takes him a while, because he is quite patient - but 10 minutes of sitting there - me not being able to get out, him not being able to pull around OR back up, because there's somebody else behind him by this time . . . . He scoots even closer to this woman's car and then hops out and goes to her window and starts acting irritated with her of course. I wished he would have approached when he was, you know, feeling more patient, but we all have our moments of weakness, you might say.
Anyway, she gets out and is quite angry with him, because she says, "How can I pull forward when you're riding on my bumper? You've got paint from your car ON my bumper, and how can I pull forward?"
I'm not sure what that had to do with anything, um . . . but she was pretty convinced that for someone to tap her bumper meant she was stuck there? I don't know.
Anyway, I finally went into the eye doctor's office. At that point, my luck was running low, you might say, or just - it was one of those days, I guess - because I filled out a bunch of paperwork, which I had been 10 minutes early in order to fill out, and I was now exactly on time, instead of early. Sitting there telling them how many surgeries I had had on this piece of paper - four, by the way - I've had four surgeries. Um, and . . . oh, you want to know what they were?
Wisdom teeth out. Steel rod in broken right leg. Lasik eye surgery. Tonsillectomy - which was the worst one. Yeah.
And then, the technician took me into the back room, did a little bit of eye testing on me. And I tell her my story. It goes like this: A couple of weeks ago, I had Covid-19, we believe, and I think I must have banged my head, perhaps, because I was struggling to be able to stand up, and was collapsing on the floor, and I may have banged my head. So now my right eye was seeing bright light and had blurry vision.
So she takes down my story, typing it up, goes out the door, says, "I'll bring the doctor to you in a few minutes," comes back and says, "The doctor needs you to have a negative Covid test to show before he can see you."
So I'm like, "Well! Guess that's that." And honestly, my vision had been doing well the past few days, and I almost canceled the appointment anyway, but at least now I knew that my glasses were working about as good as they could, because I was able to read the tiniest little letters on the wall with my glasses on. So I could skip the optometrist, and I could skip coming back here, because I was not about to go get a Covid test to have my eye checked when it was already better.
And Papa got over the "flush up against" bumper scenario. He never stayed irritated long.
"STRENGTHENED WITH ALL MIGHT, ACCORDING TO HIS GLORIOUS POWER, UNTO ALL PATIENCE AND LONGSUFFERING WITH JOYFULNESS."