Member-only story
Looking For The Buddha
Life lessons from my dad.
I was pacing and smoking in my mother’s Bakersfield, California back yard. I was on the phone with my dad. We had already been talking about nothing and everything for a couple of hours.
I’m not sure how the topic of heinous chores came up. It did, though and twisted around to doing dishes. Neither he nor I enjoyed doing dishes. He had a sinkful of dishes for over five years. He would just squirt soap over them once in a while with some hot water. He never actually washed them.
I did.
His landlord evicted him to move some relatives into his tiny back house that was at one point a garage. Probably in the 1920s. It had been my rental before dad’s. I gave it up when the girls were in Montana and I moved to Hollywood to live with the band.
Dad lived there for many years. I lived there with him and Maggie, my youngest daughter, for a few years. The dishes accumulated after Maggie and I left. Dad claimed most of the dishes were mine from the time I lived there. For five years.
When Dad got evicted, he also had a blood clot in his leg and wasn’t supposed to do any heavy lifting. So I would drive down from Bakersfield, a two-hour drive to Pasadena, and spend the day packing his belongings. Many boxes didn’t need packing as they were never…
