My Mum had gotten stronger, so on Mondays, I had been accompanying my parents to a thrift store on Ohio River Boulevard. It was a place for Mum to go, social butterfly that she is, to get out of the house for a bit.
We hovered around my Mum for the first few visits. She had been so fragile after her radiation treatments, clutching the shopping cart and with her oxygen tank in the kiddie seat. My Dad and I were both worried about her, I suppose. But gradually, her strength improved and we felt better about her taking off on her own once we reached the store.
Those weekly trips got to be a little boring. I was never really looking for anything, just browsing the books and sometimes the wall of household castoffs. Dad would poke along, looking at the tools and the electronics equipment. Sometimes we would meet up at the books, sometimes I would find him camped out on some random chair or dingy sofa, staring off into space.
Dad slowed down dramatically in January, and I would find him camped out in a chair much sooner. I wasn’t the only one that bugged him about his health. My sister did, and so did the regulars and staff at the thrift store. I tried to talk to him about his health, but all it did was make him angry.
Over the next month or so, I would give the racks and shelves a desultory inspection and find my Dad. We would talk about politics, the rise of feminism, and the books we were passing back and forth. Every week, I would search the thrift store for some outrageous hat. I love hats, always have. Dad would, more often then not, roll his eyes and make snarky comments about them, but I didn’t care. It got to be a game when we were visiting the thrift store, finding some totally off the wall hat that I knew would make him twitch.
My sister had given me a wonderful vintage hat, completely covered in feathers. It has been sitting in my closet for months, I have never found an occasion to wear it. I wore it to Gmiter’s, for my Dad’s viewing, just so I could tell people stories about my Dad and his antipathy for my hats. It was perfect, Dad would have absolutely hated this hat.