EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
KID
QUIPS
“One night, my 3-year-old asked me if she could sleep in my bed. I told her no. She said, “That’s not fair! Why does Daddy get to sleep in your bed?” READ MORE
fatherhood
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Seven cars have made the turn this hour. They come whooshing down Greencrest Drive, make the sharp left onto Farmcrest, and keep going. These are not Cadillacs with curb-scrapers, these impostors who pass us by; they are Chryslers and Datsuns and AMC Pacers, mud-splattered and ill-maintained and nothing like the car we are waiting for, the one that is always shiny, even the day after a rainstorm, a dapper car, a car like a clean-shaven old man in pressed slacks. They are here. The Cadillac has stopped in our horseshoe driveway and already we are at its doors, arms thrown around its occupants, and, after the embrace, reaching for the glove compartment. We are a Dentyne household, but the glove compartment is full of Trident. It is the most wonderful smelling glove compartment in the world. An immigrant’s son lives 95 years. He manufactures uniforms for the wartime U.S. Army. He sells denims and plaids from coast to coast through five decades. He rebounds from business setbacks and falls from rooftops and all the hazards of a do-it-yourself life. He emerges smiling and quick on his feet from the installation of two false hips and a pacemaker. He coaxes and cheers two accomplished and kindhearted sons into doctorhood. All this the immigrant’s son does, and now, at the end, what his grandson remembers, remembers with the senses while everything else is remembered with the mind, is the chewing gum in the glove compartment. My father’s father came from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to visit us four or five times a year. At trade shows in Hilton ballrooms, we sought out Grandpa Ben’s booth, watched with pride as the buyers came to him, one after another, respect in their eyes, accepted his handshake as an honor, and bought and bought and bought. The clothes were ordinary. The salesman was not. The scent of Trident, the sight of those neatly stacked blue packs of peppermint, was for us the gateway to a week of crisp kindness. It was the manly kindness of shaving demonstrations and the slap of cologne on cheeks and winks across the dinner table and admonitions that we were “the best” and therefore bore the responsibility of doing the best. It was a kindness whose hugs were muscular – the physical bestowal of spiritual power from one generation to another – a bracing kindness, a kindness the flavor of strong mint. Somehow it seems that if I remember that flavor, I can never, ever forget the rest. |
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