‘What about all that weed mat we put down for you?’ I ask.
‘I think maybe it wasn’t put down close enough to the plant trunks,’ Mum observes, and I note her clever use of ‘it wasn’t’ rather than ‘you didn’t.’
‘It just about kills your mother’s back,’ Doctor Dad throws in a medical assessment, in case we’re not taking the situation seriously enough.
‘How are the actual roses, though?’ I steer the conversation away from the blame game.
‘Just beautiful,’ Mum says followed by a contented sigh. ‘The smell! The house is full of them but they don’t seem to last long enough once I cut them.’
‘It was on the radio last Valentine’s Day,’ Jeff says, ‘that roses prefer warmer water and if you add a little sugar to the vase –’
‘Warm water!’ and ‘Sugar!’ Mum and Dad choke at the same time, as though Jeff has just suggested they use the blood of a virgin to preserve Mum’s precious blooms.
‘Apparently . . .’
‘Did he just say “sugar”?’ Dad mutters in my direction.
‘Warm water!’ Mum says again. ‘I’ve been growing roses for forty odd years but I’ve never heard that one!’
Even with tasks that our parents purportedly dislike, there’s still some hesitation in handing over all aspects of the resolution. If you’re on the phone to a service provider to sort out some issue on their behalf, they’ll often be in the background performing some overblown version of charades trying to get you to say certain things that you’ve yet to bring into the conversation, or there’ll be a hastily scrawled note slid your way, written in a weird shorthand transcript impossible to decipher . . . so that will be followed up with, yep, you guessed it, some further overblown version of charades. Even if you do incorporate their helpful suggestions mid-conversation with the poor customer service person on the end of the line and you get the refund your parents were after, you can bet a fairly high proportion of your sanity that once you hang up you’ll hear a sentence that begins, ‘I would have . . .’
My mother knows I have a fairly committed indulgence toward purchasing every single cookbook ever produced and watching hour after hour of cooking shows, but my suggestion that the best mashed potato is made by refrigerating boiled potatoes prior to mashing induced a coronary.
‘Putting hot food into a cold fridge? You’ll kill yourself!’
* * *
While I’m their go-to guy for anything to do with technology, Dad will occasionally attempt to take control of appliance purchases for the house. Why is it that we spend half our lives seeking out the hippest brands to elicit awe and praise from friends and colleagues, and the other half of our lives not giving a damn about any brand on the planet? Price becomes the only factor when considering a purchase.
‘Aldi have a portable ice-maker on special next week,’ Dad says in the cool of the car. ‘I thought we might get one.’
Ice-maker is interchangeable with any appliance they don’t really need. Aldi is interchangeable with ‘supply of materials for the rubbish dump’.
‘What brand is it?’
‘Aldi.’
‘No, what brand?’
‘I dunno. But if Aldi’s selling it . . .’
I could remind him of the several no-name brand items they’d purchased in the past few years, all of which broke not long after appearing in their house and remain gathering dust in the garage, unreturnable or unreturned. But I don’t need to, he’s already catching my drift.
‘It comes with a five-year warranty.’
‘Buy cheap, pay twice.’ Jeff employs one of his favourite sayings.
To prove Jeff right, there is that heavily mounting evidence in Mum and Dad’s garage. I, on the other hand, take this as his tacit approval for me to spend as much money as I like, whenever I like, but I’m not sure this is his intention.
I do wonder why this concept of bargains is so irresistible to my parents. Sure, they’re not made of money, but we never put up with no name brands in the past, so why are they quick to embrace them these days? How many sub-standard things need to break before they learn the lesson? It takes extreme control from me not to utter the words ‘told you so’ a few months after one of these purchases is discovered gathering dust in their appliance cemetery . . . I mean garage.
Parents seem to pick and choose where their kids’ help will be required when it comes to certain purchases. Ice-maker? No problem, I’ve got it. Something a bit more expensive? Well, take this example: whenever I visit them for a cup of tea, Dad will excuse himself to go tend to his lawns using the mower he could leniently describe as having purchased ‘on special’. Picture the first lawnmower ever produced. Dad purchased one that resembled the very next model after that. It weighed about two hundred kilograms, was the size of a small car and was as rusty as my once-angelic singing voice is now. The pull cord was so stiff that as I refilled the kettle and watched him through the kitchen window, I thought at any minute his arm would be reefed right out of its socket and fly up over the neighbour’s fence. After fourteen yanks on the cord his face was dripping with perspiration, his skin red with rage, and he was calling the machine a bastard over and over again. (Incidentally, ‘bastard’ is about the worst cuss word you’ll hear coming out of Dad’s mouth. When we were growing up, the most insulting thing he could ever hurl at somebody was to suggest they were a ‘clown’ – delivering the line with a look on his face not too dissimilar to the one he pulls nowadays when he finds a speck of rosemary in his bowl of chips.)
Finally, on the fifteenth tug, the mower coughed and spluttered, expelling a big green cloud of poisonous gas, and Dad was on his way, pushing the machine in his slow shuffle, as though his diabetic feet were walking on broken glass.
When he mows the lawn, I do not offer to help. Most people will condemn me for this, and I’m already being nominated for World’s Worst Son. However, since mowing is the only real exercise my father gets, I don’t want to hasten his decline and have him chairbound by the end of next week. His perfectly shorn lawn provides him an ‘interest’, if you will. I think it gives him a routine, something to marvel at and be proud of.
On another visit, he greeted me at the door with, ‘I’ll get you to take a look at the whipper snipper while you’re here, Skeet.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ I asked, knowing the answer: it’s in fact one of those brands that have no negative reviews online . . . because it has no reviews online.
‘It’s killing me,’ Dad said, followed by a slight moan. ‘I just can’t start the bastard with my Arthur Itis.’
Why Dad insists on talking to me about anything mechanical is anyone’s guess. I’m as adept with machines as I am on a rugby field. It’d be like asking Kylie Minogue to sing Megadeth. Just ask Jeff, who, for eighteen years, has been lecturing me about the need to treat machinery with respect and care. Similarly, for eighteen years, he’s been despairing at my inability to pay attention to his lectures. Might I add that when Jeff runs over an eight-hundred-dollar brush cutter with our tractor it’s simply a case of ‘accidents happen’. Whereas if I leave a twenty-year-old pair of scissors out in the rain, it’s a mortal attack on his person and shows a profound lack of respect to every mechanical object ever created.
I followed Dad into the garage and watched him lift a machine taller than he is. The starting mechanism demanded a complicated combination of locking, pushing and pulling all at once and, as I watched my dad’s gnarled fingers grapple with the tiny knobs and buttons, my heart melted.
‘Bastard of a thing,’ he said again.
Shamefully, I hadn’t looked at Dad’s hands for some time and now I saw they’re the hands of an old man, not my dad. His once meaty, chunky fingers, which I thought were the strongest on the planet, were formed into a permanent crunch.
‘If you can just start it for me, Skeet?’ he asked.
Their yard consists of five patches of grass, ranging in size from about ten square metres to about one hundred square metres. Dad has to divide the mowing up into manageable sections and it takes him several days to complete the task. Will doing the lawns kill him, or will not doing the lawns? I honestly don’t know the answer to the question, but as his leg doctor told him he needs to walk every day for as far as he can until the pain is ‘unbearable’, I can only assume a fifteen-minute lawnmowing session is the best thing for him. Besides, somehow among all his ailments his heart has never given him any problems.
But I just can’t shake the image of him: this man who was once my indestructible father, stooped and shuffling while pushing the mower; those hands that, when I was a child, seemed invincible bastions of strength, now unable to start a whipper snipper.
The morning after that visit, I asked Jeff to take me to his favourite place on the planet: Bunnings. That I requested a trip to his Hardware Mecca filled him with so much joy I may as well have told him I thought Mary J Blige is a better singer than Cyndi Lauper. We left the store with a mower and a whipper snipper. They’re battery-powered and light as feathers and are both original brand names, not copycat ones designed to lull you into a false sense of quality. I don’t think there’s been a day since that Dad has not remarked at how they have transformed his life.
