More Michigan delights

The first morning of our visit to Michigan we were pampered. We got to sleep in, enjoy a nice warm brunch, slowly enter the day. My parents lulled us into relaxation and complacency. Ah, this is the life! we thought. And then they put us to work.

My parents are not above employing enforced labor. Anyone who visits them -- they don't even have to be relatives, my parents are equal opportunity taskmasters -- is likely to be pressed into service of one sort or another. So that morning, one presided over my cleaning of the kitchen while the other kept watch over Joe while he cleaned out my mom's car in preparation for taking it to, as my mother said, the graveyard.

Okay, technically my mom didn't make me clean her kitchen. She didn't even ask me to. But it was definitely NOT Joe's idea to clean out the car.

I cleaned the kitchen because I could not stand the counters anymore. They were begging me to clean them. "Please, please, clean us, we haven't seen a cleanser since -- what's it been, Mack, like 18, 19 years?" "Yeah, I think it was back around '89 or so."..."Please!"

How could I ignore that? When I am 82, like my mother, I will probably be much better at ignoring things like that.

I had been somewhat worried that my mother might take offense at my cleaning initiative, somewhat like my father had done at my insistence that I drive his car. In fact, I told Joe to help keep my mom out of the kitchen while I cleaned it, a request he ultimately could not fulfill owing to his own cleaning assignment.

I needn't have worried. After I had worked halfway around the counter, scrubbing with everything I could find in the cupboard, my mom asked, only half joking, "Would you like to be my housekeep--"

"Only today, Mom, only today. And only the kitchen."

At this point my father came in to report on the cleaning out of the car. My mom continued, "That's going to be cleaner than it's been since--"

"Since you got the car, yeah, it sure will be! We're really clearing it out!" my dad said. (Notice the "we.")

"I was talking about the kitchen," my mom said stoutly. "Not the car. Why do I care how clean my car is now that it's going away?"

Later we showed my parents the book about our historic community that was just published. Our house is in it, and we are even in it ("Behold the Only Residents Who Do Not Recycle!") (Just kidding). It's a beautiful book (not just because we are in it), and we showed it to them in the hopes of enticing them to come visit us and see all the wondrous beauty we live in (by which I do NOT mean our kitchen counters). My mom looked through the book cover to cover, put it down, and said, "Well, now we've seen everything so we don't have to come visit."

So much for psychology.

But my dad told Joe that maybe they would come see us sometime, although of course he said this when my mom was not around. I'm sure she will have something to say about it, and it won't be the same thing he said. Perhaps I should call them, and then they can discuss it between themselves while I wait for someone to have a conversation with me.

And if they do come, boy will I have some assignments for them...