Frittering

I spent the last few days visiting with two of my parents, my father and stepmother, who long ago moved from the valley to Sebastopol. My folks are very ill and very poor. My father let it slip, as we were driving around doing errands and enjoying the autumnal scenes of west Sonoma, that he was in danger of losing his wedding rings as he had pawned them for groceries and did not have cash to pay the interest.

So I spent my visit engineering a way to retrieve the rings without offending their sense of dignity. I pasted on a perma-grin and waited for the right time to sound nonchalant in offering to pay the pawn shop off. The right moment to sound cavalier about spending $180 I don't really have, the proper affect to sound unphased about the symbolism of the event.

My folks have a luminous, thriving marriage. After thirty-three years, they still sound like kids in love. There have been moments when their struggles have the quality of listening in on the Gift of the Magi. They have often been in the position of sacrificing something for the other even as the sacrifice diminishes the other one's ability to give back. They have given everything they have to give to each other and they don't have much left. When the first one of them goes, the other will probably follow in short order.

Symbolism aside, the rings are beautiful. I am not a fan of gold usually but the cut out designs encircling the band are whimsical without being silly, ornamental without pretense, generous but not ostentatious. All three of us would like to see them passed to me and then to my son.

The material inheritance of their life that interests me otherwise runs to Henry Miller Library posters, handmade spoof business cards on yellowing paper, red and black cotton molas. I have declined to adopt their double yellow headed Amazonian parrot, but my father's copy of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia is a dear object to me.

Their struggles, at least materially, are a hand they have largely dealt themselves. Their shame at living in a remodeled chicken coop and having to scrimp so they can put soup and bread on the table when I visit just makes it harder to help them. They did much wrong for themselves—cigarettes will kill my father quietly, in the shadow of other addictions so formidable they might well have killed other people several times over. But the people who love them agree that they have long ago paid their pound of flesh, reformed their excesses, made amends to us.

But I do admit, on a day when putting their visceral pain to words seems narcissistic, pompous, cheap, that I wish one of us just had some fucking money. My father was reminiscing about an amusing little side business he used to have. It was something I thought he did when the rent was coming due or he wanted us to take a vacation to Lake Tahoe.

It went like this. He would take a stuffed parrot toy, shove a fistful of 90,000 hits of LSD up its ass and fed ex it to the east coast. Several weeks later the parrot would return home, its contraband replaced with rolls of cash. As he was telling me the details, I did the math in my head. He and my stepmother had put most of the proceeds up their noses, in their arms, inhaled them from the mouth of a base pipe. It had been at least $600,000 in 15 years. And this was a minor part of their income.

It's folly to wish people in the grip of serious but lucrative drug addiction had made the stable, forward thinking choices others might have. And though I wish there had been money for me to go to college, perhaps a piece of land to live on and pass to my son, I have no resentment, no animosity. They have always been emotionally generous, supportive, and transparent parents. I could not have done better. Still, I wish I didn't have to worry that the next time they have to chose between their rings and a bowl of soup will be the last.