I remember the day I admitted to my parents mortality, it was a sunny day in their new neighborhood. They’ve lived there for years but this was my first time to see it. Not the greatest child I know, but I was the west coast, young, trendy, in love, and working for a company younger than my brother’s toddler. Now I was the south again. Sitting on the porch with my dad drinking ice tea without one comfortable word. College, employment, divorce. We kept our voices low, cause it was a neighborhood built to be a neighborhood. They were required to have at least three trees in their yards and they had to ask permission to paint their house anything other than the 32 pre-approved colors. These suburbs depressed me. My parents gave me the fire in my soul and the strong muscles in my middle fingers. They gave me the strength and the moxie to fight against the cage that is the system. They’ve been tamed. 

My father had a way of talking to me that could convey his disappointment and disapproval to the deepest part of my soul. Past my hatred for him, and past the part of me that loves him for making me hate him. A few ladies, a few more years away from the grave than the rest of the neighborhood power-walked by in baggy t-shirts tucked into their exercise shorts.

My father waved, and lowered his voice to me, “Don’t embarrass me, Timothy” 

I slammed down my tea on the small glass table between us, just hard enough to put it on the lips of every bored gossiping housewife. 

I would have slammed the door but I knew leaving it open would piss him off more.

Inside my mother was cooking. Which was strange. I left home when I was 19 with only four mother cooked meals in my stomach. They each had a name and a story. The Dessert, Side Dish and Dip Only Family Reunion of 93, where my mother said she would take care of the main course, got a business call and left an empty house and a full oven for three hours. The Christmas Fiasco of 98, we still don’t understand it but it some how involves the story of my dad beating the smoke detector with a Wiffle bat. The Thanksgiving that wasn’t of 2000, mother didn’t know her new oven required you to press start. And the time I stayed home from school with a cold and got food poisoning- homemade chicken noodle soup. 

I helped my mother cook and she was happy that I learned something on my own. She asked me to get a few potatoes and some garlic out. They were in the refrigerator. I smiled and talked her into moving them into where they belonged, the pantry. I took the peanut-butter with me too. The pantry was mostly empty with a few small glass containers of dried herbs and spices, some of them bought twice because they were on a recipe card and she couldn’t remember if she had them or not. Then I saw it. It was a simple loaf of bread that told me my parents wouldn’t be around to see me be their age. It was double fiber wheat bread enriched with Omega-3. I noticed it then everything else like it. Copious amounts of health this and anti-aging that. They had more drugs than I did during my first (which was also my last) year of college. My parents were dying and my quarter life crises ended that night. 

  Over dinner I watched my parents more than I talked. They seemed in love. I couldn’t understand it. They fought most of my youth. They alsp worked harder than any people I’ve ever met. Then again where I work has a free snack bar and the corporate policy on sleeping on the job is; naps increase productivity. I always told myself I would never work as hard as them, but most of all I told myself I would never fall in love with the wrong person like they did. One fucking fight, that was much smaller than the many times my father packed his bags or my mother packed them for him. One fight and I threw a perfect relationship away and ran back to hide under the covers of my bed and cry into my pillows that didn’t even exist in this house. 

They were getting old and dinner was early enough I didn’t even have to catch a redeye to get back home. They told me to stay and my father told me to do the only thing I was good at; sit on my ass and think. 

I went home to my career, to my wife and to our bed. To our yoga class, to our two cars we can barely afford. To my Triumph Thruxton I shouldn’t of bought. To her college books, to my high-school diploma I drew on with crayons. To my life I made for me. The life that is worth every struggle and the woman that is worth every fight we’ll go through.