Visiting home

This weekend I was at home, in Texas, visiting my parents. With both of them pushing 70, it's getting hard not to see each visit as significant, as something I'll want to look back on later.

Case in point #1. Saturday night we were out at a restaurant in the nearby suburb of Richardson which features a large Asian population and is probably as close as you can get around Dallas to a Chinatown. The local alumni association of my dad's alma mater, National Taiwan University, was having its annual meeting there, and though dad was nice enough to consider my attendance "up to me," every time I'd answer in the negative he'd come back with, "Are you sure you don't want to go?" I got the point.

Because he was singing with some of the other alums as part of the evening's program, my dad left for the restaurant a little earlier than my mom and I. This gave mom and me a little bit of time to chat one-on-one as we made the half-hour drive to Richardson on our own. It turned out that I slept most of the way there, but coming back after dinner and the program, I found myself more awake. My mom liked to talk after these kind of events anyway.

"Dad was so happy you came. He was joking with everybody. It was a good time in his life when he went to Tai-Da [National Taiwan University]."

I nodded and replied that, yes, I remembered when his family got the sign made declaring that he'd been accepted to Taiwan's number-one university. For a town as small as my dad's was -- it hardly shows up on the map -- getting such a sign made to post outside your storefront was a big deal. My mom went on.

"He never learned Pekingese [a dialect of Mandarin], because he grew up in such a rural area. He learned it at Tai-Da. Even today he makes mistakes while speaking Mandarin."

I had to admit to myself, I'd never heard that about my dad before. We continued on home, and bands of light came and went through the interior of the car as we passed under street lights. I wondered how many other details about my dad I might never hear. I thought of how I didn't speak Mandarin at all.

Case in point #2. Sunday afternoon we had some time to while away, and I proposed we go look at HDTVs. Mom and dad have been talking about getting one for years, and I've been feeling like the time is right.

As we walked around the HDTV section of Circuit City, I casually spouted off details as they occurred to me. LCD, plasma, 1080p, DLP. At one point my dad asked me how long these TVs last. Dependability was a big thing with them -- the current TV had been in the house since the mid-1980s. 50,000 hours, I said.

Later on, I found myself walking next to my mom. She mentioned how she and dad wouldn't live as long as the TV, that I'd be getting the TV eventually. I shushed her.

Yet the damage was already done, at least damage in the sense of an idea that sears itself into your brain. I'm reminded of what people say about permanent marker ink on skin: it never gets truly washed off. Your skin just eventually sloughs away. So it goes with ideas that don't need to be repeated because they are, like permanent marker ink, indelible.

To think you're buying a TV that will outlast your parents and become your own inheritance -- that is a terrible thing.