VISITING YOUR PARENTS

This is a blog about visiting your parents, something that most adult children dread, probably with good reason. I'm a parent myself so I can see it from the other side, but even I have to admit that visits home can be something to be endured. Parents are so...clinging...so boring...so judgemental.

I don't blame old people for that. They're just victims of predatory salesmen, like the kind that sell Lazboy chairs. NEVER give in to the temptation to buy one for your parents, even if the thing is on sale. Even if it's free. You might as well buy them heroin. Old people can't resist the things and once they settle into them and turn on the TV you won't be able to pry them out with a crowbar.

 So what should old people do? That's a good question, and I don't know the answer. Some moms knit. Maybe that's the answer.

You can always tell a home that's occupied by a knitter. They don't know when to stop. They knit everything. Knitters are not as common as they used to be, and that's because the hobby is slowly being supplanted by another one...

...cat hoarding! To qualify as a cat hoarder you have to have at least 6 or 7 animals. It's hard to talk people out of cat hoarding because the practice has been ennobled in their eyes by people who call it "cat rescue" or "cat sheltering." Old folks see themselves as providing a home for abandoned cats...cats who probably escaped from other cat hoarders.

It's always a good idea to take your parents out to a restaurant, but they'll probably insist on going to a place like The Copper Kettle, which is a favorite of people with knitted sweaters who smell like cats.

The Kettle specializes in dishes like canned spinach and macaroni and cheese, the kind of dishes that are called "comfort food." Old folks like it because the portions are big and the spoons and forks are clean.

 Thanks to the 60s a new type of older parent is with us, the aging hippies. They're not above hoarding cats but they also like marijuana brownies. They eat things like kale, which is like green leather, and are quick to point out that whatever you like to eat is probably full of toxins put there by the CIA to produce a population of zombies.

Faced with the massive intimidation of Copper Kettles and cats and kale, visiting young people have come up with a weapon of their own...the cel phone. You can always tune out your parents by dialing up your friends to see if their nails are dry.