Trendsetter

Do parents get cuter as they get older, or is it just me? I'm visiting my parents, and this morning I happened upon my dad deep in his new favorite hobby. Pretty new porch, flowers all around, and Dad at the breakfast table. In front of him was an array of slivers of paper, newspaper pages, and several stuffed envelopes. In his hands, he joyfully wielded a large pair of silver scissors.

A scrapbooker? Nay--nothing so socially insignificant. To my mother's gently tolerant amusement, he has lately developed a strategy for handling the unwanted credit card offers plaguing our nation. With the care of a surgeon, he excises his name from the letters, fills each offer's postage-paid return envelope with a different letter (supplemented by pieces of cut-up envelope and newspaper clippings), and mails them in. He is powerful; he is joyful; he is sticking it to the man.

This morning he was dismayed to find that one of the companies has begun using smaller envelopes, all the tougher to force several pages of newspaper in. "I want them to be as heavy as possible," he said, intent upon his task.

Actually, I had recently heard this strategy advised in some newspaper column or something, and I mentioned this to him. "Really?" he asked quietly, reflectively. Then, with a bashful pride, "You read that?"

You see, my dad has long considered himself to be a trendsetter. Ask him, and he will list a series of items for whose popularity he feels personally responsible. For example, all during my school days, after a long workday and an 80-mile commute, he would pick me up from school, come home, and go out to the woodshop to work at the little business he and my mother ran (making wooden frames for the glass industry in S. Jersey). But before he went out to the shop, he would don a set of khaki work clothes, clothes that he also wore all day on Saturday and Sunday.

Worn and soft, they always smelled of the clean scent of pine sawdust. He wore them so much that a boyfriend of mine once said, when we were discussing clothes, "I've only ever seen your dad in that brown outfit." My dad is a hard worker, and he wore those clothes all the time because he worked simply all the time. He had no time for fashion.

So, imagine his surprise to turn on the TV one night and see not only pairs of teenager happily swing dancing in khaki pants, but also the particular, generously pocketed cargo pants that were his especial favorite!

Khakis and cargo pants--he claims credit for introducing them both to the American public. He's also proud of "by owner for sale," a phrase he once painted on a sign. I was there for that one, and I asked him why he was writing it backwards. "Because it's different!" he asserted. It's true that I've now seen it in many places, an observation he interprets as a sign of his cultural power. He also claims credit for common invocations of the concept of karma, but my mother objects here: "You did not invent karma!" After she walks away, he tells me in lower tones, "I thought of it, but now they're using it on this TV show."

If his abilities continue to wax, market-watchers should all be alert to rising stock values in companies that print banana stickers (which he has been collecting since 1980). And promotional magnets, a cache of which we discovered yesterday in "his" cabinet. And on and on . . . I'll keep you posted.