For those of you who are keeping up, this is the third installment of my little blog series on Life with Jake. Jake is my dad. He will be 77 years old next month. I would like to say that his actions in the stories I’ve been relating are due to his older age, but sadly, they are not. He has always been this way. While growing up, common phrases around our house were, “don’t touch my walls, you’ll leave fingerprints and scuff marks”; “don’t lean back in my chair, you’ll break the legs (not our legs, the chair legs)”; “close the refrigerator door – your cooling the whole house” (you know, the swapping of air syndrome – doesn’t every parent have this?); “no you can’t have new shoes those still have part of a sole, put newspaper in the bottom like we did”; “turn off the lights you are wasting electricity”; and so forth and so on. My dad was one of those kids who walked to school in the middle of a snowstorm, uphill, coming and going. Because snowstorms were so frequent in Birmingham, Alabama when he was growing up!
When we were kids we were not allowed to take showers, we had to take tub baths. According to Jake, if you took a shower you were wasting water. The only time I got to take a shower was when I went to camp or slept over at a friend’s house. So, being the rebellious child that I was, when I moved out of the house, I vowed to never take another bath – and I haven’t. Showers only for this chick! And now, when I visit my parents’ house, I take showers. And what is Jake’s response? To beat on the door and tell me to hurry up - I’m wasting his water! Seriously! If you don’t comply with his request, he will turn off the water to the house to force you out of the shower.
The other night my son decided to get a shower after my dad had gone to bed. Ahhh, that’s using the old ‘noggin. If Jake is asleep then he won’t know how long you are in the shower and you don’t have to hurry along. This would be the logical thought process. However, with Jake, this would not be the case. About 3 minutes into Jared’s shower, Jake comes out of his bedroom, groggy from sleep, in his 80 degree sleep attire (see previous blog), to tell me to tell Jared to hurry up, he is taking too long in the shower, thus wasting his water. My mother looks at me (as we were in the middle of a conversation) and tells me she is going to kill him. I tell her I will provide the weapon. I relay the message to Jared who quickly finishes his shower as he doesn’t want to get caught covered in soap and no way to rinse it off.
While my parents do take showers, if you live with Jake, showers should take 2 minutes or less. We explain that it takes us at least 3 or more minutes to shampoo and rinse our hair. He says it doesn’t take him that long. Of course not, he’s practically bald!
I would love to talk to my grandparents to find out if Jake practiced military maneuvers in the front yard while he was growing up.
I’m just sayin’,
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