One thing about this holiday visit back home that lifted my spirits, made me feel like I was properly progressing in life, was realizing - and having both of them confirm - that at this point I’m equal or better at domestic tasks than my parents.

Like, my dad has absolutely NO tool use sense, he manages to fail even basic hammer/wrench/screwdriver tasks, and we lived in a condominium development for the sake of leaving the exterior and yard maintenance to anyone else (though it doesn’t look that different from other suburban developments – semidetached “town”houses on not quite cul-de-sacs, they had planting/parking islands in the middle).

Meanwhile even when my mom does gardening it’s wearily with dedicated power tools and calling in experts, so the fact that I’ve appreciably remade my yard with bladed hand tools seriously impresses them.

(Back when consumer cameras had separate viewfinder lenses my dad could never take a picture without cutting his subjects’ heads off, which makes me wonder how he aimed a rifle as an airborne officer. I suppose that’s what your men are for. Also, at one extended family dinner where military reminiscences broke out around my cousin training 18D he said back then they were trained in hip fire, which is some Zen archery shit, though I guess Weaver Stance wasn’t even a thing until after his time.)

Cooking - my mom mentioned how much more passion and verve I have at it, starting to grasp the underlying principles and improvising out of my cabinets, rather than exhaustively preparing menus off of recipe cards ahead of time. I suppose it explains some things that my home cuisine growing up was the second generation of joylessly going off the Betty Crocker cookbook, not least why the dishes she picked up from friends during this time were so much better than the regular rotation started with.

I mean she always bitched about this at the time, the planning and the cooking, and I told her she should just quit then. Important to her martyr complex though, she always said that then Dad and I would starve. In reality half of it I would have learned to cook quick meals earlier, half of it would be realizing that a professional-class family in the 1990s should be going out and eating prepared food more and not spending hours turning organ meat and onions into a theoretically palatable meal.

I suppose that would have come dangerously close for her self-image and sense of purpose to the realization that a professional-class family in the 1990s should not have one member as a dedicated homemaker, though.

She still beats me at shopping, that was always the saving grace of her dishes, she knew what was in season where, from little farm stands and standalone butchers/bakers/fishmongers, the things that got absorbed as supermarket counters. Tho that could shade into weird ‘70s-ass “exotic” dishes, avocado slices with grapefruit and some mango-ish sauce, and anyway that shopping always took so much time. We ended up going an hour out to Allentown on our second trip to get a leather jacket.

Cleaning, their house looks a lot better but I realize that’s two things. One, when I got this house I knew it’d have to be actively demolished down to the studs and redone before too long so I’m not that big on upkeep; for two they always had someone clean it weekly (first a glacially older black woman named Margaretha, who would join us for leftovers lunch and start “now the good book says, judge not lest ye be judged…” before going on to extensive gossip about other clients we didn’t know from Adam; later a woman I guess I’d chiefly identify as “a single mom”, though she went through a few husbands over the duration). Once you clear that out, and figure in that I just never got wooden tables I never use that need polishing, we’re about even.