One of the short prayers I offer up every morning, in a cloud of incense smoke and overwrought emotion, is the request for help in being the best son, brother, and husband that I can be. Everybody else can go to hell. Just kidding, just kidding, sort of -- the second short prayer is help in fitting myself to be of maximum service to my fellow man and woman.
Anyway, I'm making the effort to call my parents every couple of days. I have a hidden agenda, of course: to make them see, eventually, that I know what is best for them and that they should do my bidding. My words, fortunately, are vague and non-threatening. I keep my mouth shut. I say the best things when my mouth is shut -- great wisdom pours out. My mother is one of world's great Directors. I can see today that I learned at the knee of a master. That woman is On Message. She has an agenda and you cannot knock her off that agenda. She would have been a great press secretary.
I'm getting better at keeping my frustration under control. The prayer, after all, is that I make myself available for whatever help is necessary. I'm hardly a good friend if I'm making suggestions on landscaping while your house is burning down. I might be a great landscaper and my suggestions might be brilliant but your fucking house is burning down. Service work after a meeting is cleaning up the coffee machine. That's the service work. I can suggest away but that's what needs to be done. I'm the guy suggesting that maybe we should try a coffee service or bring our own coffee or switch to tea, none of which needs to be done when there's a dirty coffee machine staring me in the face.
Pow-err-less.
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