The Care and Feeding of Parents

My parents came up for a visit last week. Naturally, things didn’t go quite to plan.

“So,” Mom asks. “What time should be aim for to avoid rush hour traffic?”

“Four,” I say. “Which means you need to leave by around 12:30 or so. Call me when you’re on the road, and then call Erin [my sister] when you get to Macon.” (So she’d know to leave work and head home to meet them.)

“Okay!”

I held out until 1:30 before I called.

“Yesssss?” Dad answers.

“Um, are you on the way?”

“Oh, yeah. We’re just leaving Ashburn [three hours away]. We stopped for lunch. Hang on.” He hands the phone to Mom.

“You were supposed to call me when you left,” I remind her.

“Well, I called Erin!”

I refrain from headdesking, but barely. “You were supposed to call me when you left home, Mom. And then call Erin from Macon.”

Insert long, convoluted rambling about the route they plan to take to get from Atlanta to Kansas (where they were headed to visit friends), while I try to interrupt because, hey, at work here, and you pretty much have a microcosm of my parents.

Gotta love ’em. Because it’s either that or shoot ’em. Or myself.