For My Sisters

I don't do the grocery shopping. Or rather, I don't do the bulk of it. The grocery shopping I do is the after-grocery-shopping grocery shopping - stopping on the way home from work to get milk or bread or Ovaltine. I can't be trusted even with this because a cool third of everything I pick up will be the wrong something, the wrong brand, the wrong size, just the wrong thing. If I'm sent for six items then two will be wrong, nine then three are wrong. You get the idea.

Tonight I was sent for three items and, you guessed it, one was wrong. Instead of the usual Kraft Parmesan Cheese which, I suspect, has no cheese in it whatsoever, I picked up actual grated Parmesan. The kids who eat spaghetti in this house eat it with only butter and Parmesan (or, spaghetti cheese as it's called [I know, I know, no red gravy? I'm not really sure these kids are mine.]) So as the pasta with its inferior superior cheese was being refused by little people who don't even contribute to the bottom line around here, I was catching the blame. In my defense I raised my voice with "As long as all these kids are going to eat on spaghetti is butter and cheese is it too much to ask that they eat butter and cheese in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?!" That's right, I channeled George Bailey, which I suppose is better than channeling Jack Torrance.

I do this a lot, actually, channeling this wonderful, indelible movie character. Unfortunately, however, it's not usually the good-natured, optimistic dreamer who longs to help his friends and clients and be the best family man he can. It's usually the George Bailey who trashes his scale model suspension bridge and doesn't understand why they have to have all these kids in the first place. But I'm trying. I hope to be the responsible George Bailey someday, the George Bailey with all the character, and especially the George Bailey who gets all that cash dumped on his table and a peck on the cheek from Violet. Va-voom!