An Apple A Day

Why won't people go to the doctor?? I'm always saying how much my dad, grandmother, and I are alike, but in this respect, I defiantly break from the pack. It's the 21st century! They aren't going to bleed you with leeches, or mush around in your brains Abraham-Lincoln-post-assassination-style, so why do you still think they're incompetent and are only out for money?

Okay, maybe a lot of them are out for your money. But let's think this through. If they say, bleed you with leeches, or give you medicine that makes you worse, or are somehow counterproductive to your health, and assuming you're a logical person, you're going to switch to a hopefully more competent physician. And pay somebody else. And they are losing money. So even if, when the smiling middle schooler on career day asks why they became a doctor and they reply for the bundles of cash, you can bet they still want to help you out so you will continue to provide them with said bundles of cash. So get over that! I'm looking at you, Grandma!

And Dad. Dad who thinks he's invincible. Oh, my arm's broken in three places. It'll heal itself in a week. No, no it won't.

So that's an extreme example. But he has this weird growth on his head (yeah I know, mental images) that has been there for quite some time and he REFUSES to get it checked out. He has a family history of skin cancer and spent more of his childhood with sun poisoning than without AND has a bald spot right there allowing the sun an all-access pass to his poor little scalp.

Would it really be so terribly hard to go the doctor, get it looked at, and probably just have them lop the thing right off? If I'm being as paranoid as he says and it's not skin cancer, at least he'd be rid of a growth on his scalp, which has to be an improvement by any standards. And if it is something worse, than they can take care of it before it's really bad. I'm not seeing how any of the logic here points to the "wear hats and ignore it" philosophy.

Fine, Grandma, your generation isn't so doctor dependent. Fine, Dad, you're an impenetrable force with an immune system of steel. Fine. Don't do it for you.

Do it for me. Do it for the ulcer developing in my stomach, and for the fact that I need both of you, alive and healthy. And even if I'm not enough, do it for your husband (who ironically goes to the doctor TOO MUCH) and your three children and five other grandchildren. Do it for your wife and your other son who really needs a father figure who can admit he's not invincible and seeks help when he needs it.

An apple a day is not enough.

The House That Built Me

My parents often casually throw about the idea that they're going to move away from this place after my brother leaves home (which might be never, making my worries moot! ha). I always protest. Is it selfish that I don't want other people living in what is the closest thing I've got to a childhood home?

All my life, when we visited my grandma in the house my mom grew up in, I would sleep in Mom's old bedroom and play with Mom's old toys and read Mom's old books. I hugged her old worn-out-with-love teddy bear and looked through her yearbooks. My brother and I played her old board games and admired the pictures she'd hung up when she was our ages. As you can tell, my grandma never throws anything away.

I want my kids to have that.

But there are even more selfish reasons. I want a place to come home to that feels like home. My dad's parents are kind of opposite of my mom's and Dad's childhood home(s) are occupied by random people. Grandma and Grandpa built their own house in a totally different town. The house, while familiar, isn't home to Dad. He doesn't have a bedroom there and Grandma got rid of most of his stuff or stuck it away in the attic.

I want to be able to come home, to the place I call home, not just the house where my parents happen to live. Sometimes I think about how weird it will be coming home and sleeping in my bed as a visitor. If my bed still exists at that point...

I know my parent's happiness is what should be my priority, and if moving away is what makes them happy, then I should support it. But how can they not have any attachment to this place?

Maybe I'm growing overly sentimental since my time to move on with my life looms dangerously close or maybe I've heard this song one too many times on the radio, but I really want them to keep this house, my house. I'm afraid if they get rid of it and my room becomes somebody's home office, I'll lose all the memories attached to it. Seven years of my life, arguably the most significant ones yet, unfolded under this roof. The tangible wood and carpet and shingles tether me to something bigger, a whole person I identify with and might lose touch with later. How am I supposed to get her back if her home is gone?

Viva Las Vegas

Sitting in the Barter Theater last weekend, my dad and I made a starling discovery about ourselves.

We were talking to this older gentleman in front of us during the intermission of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll," an Elvis tribute show (which is the glorified and PC way of saying Elvis impersonator). As he listed off the the shows he'd been to and how they compared to the one we were currently watching, Dad got ready to announce that we'd also seen one he mentioned.

Then he realized this was making our third Elvis show this year. We were horrified.

At the three shows we've attended (one with my immediate family and two with my grandparents), we'd spent most of them making fun of the Elvis impersonator groupies that apparently form a disturbing subculture. At one, there was even a merchandise booth run by old ladies who probably saw the real Elvis when they were teenagers. The merchandise, from a safe distance, appeared to be your usual tshirts, coffee cups, buttons, and pins emblazoned with the familiar face of the King of Rock-n-roll, but as you moved closer, it became freakily apparent that it wasn't Elvis Presley's face on the cheap goods. It was the face of the impersonator.

Now going to see one perform is one thing, but having a man pretending be another man pasted across your chest is just weird. But far weirder is how these ladies acted during the impersonator's performance. They yelled "we love you Stephen!" with the same adoration and fanaticism as real 50's Elvis fangirls. They even threw their granny panties on stage. No, I'm not kidding. They did.

They also racketed off the names of all the "Elvis Tribute Artists" who participated in the annual contest in Las Vegas and where their precious Stephen ranked among them. "Oh the one in Myrtle Beach? He's so full of himself! Barter Theater? He's got nothing on Stephen! Just a hack."

So as we stood in this tiny, historic theater, surrounded by people old enough to be my great, great grandparents, we became shockingly self-aware. I looked down at the Elvis emblazoned on my chest (at least it's the real one and not Stephen or Scot or Bruce!), the light up purse on my shoulder. I thought about the Jailhouse Rock poster hanging up at home and the purple Elvis guitar cd case in the living room. I thought about the three Elvis shows we attended.

But I also thought of all the times Dad and I spent heartily singing along to our favorite Elvis songs, complete with dramatic hand gestures and lip quivers, and the time my second grade teacher marched tie-dye Elvis shirt clad eight-year-old me down the hall to show another teacher who was a huge Elvis fan. And I thought about all the times my brother and I had watched these two Elvis biography videos to kill time in the van, his four year old lips singing every word.

And maybe we aren't the fans who cry at the Presley grave site at Graceland and maybe my undergarments stay on during Elvis tribute shows, and maybe I don't know the name of every impersonator that ever breathed, but maybe, just maybe, we are one of those people.