Op-Ed: Croutons

Okay, here's the next one. It's a fun one.



Croutons From My Father
By MEREDITH HOFFA

THE doorbell rings, and when I see it’s the U.P.S. guy I nearly hyperventilate. Few things on earth make me more insanely excited than U.P.S. Especially when I’m not expecting anything. Immediately I think: it’s happened, someone has sent me gourmet steaks.

I sign, and am handed a small padded envelope that I promptly ravage.

It’s croutons.

Not steaks at all; just a tiny, semi-crushed plastic tub of gross-looking croutons.

•

It all started a year ago when my dad and I were hunkered down in his TV room. I was on the floor stretching, which is what I tend to do when I’m not quite sure what to do. He was in his special zero-gravity recliner and, aside from the neck brace, looked more or less the same as always: Red Sox cap, blue sweatpants with the waistband inexplicably pulled up to mid-torso, fingernails buffed to a disco-ball sheen. Same as always, he was mauling one Tootsie Pop after another in that eardrum-shattering way that honestly makes me want to stop living.

Our job was to pass three long days together. He had a back injury and was in between surgeries, and my mom had asked if I could come to Boston to hang out with him while she was out of town. He wasn’t fully bedridden or anything; mostly, he could just use some help passing the timeless time. Our phone calls made clear he was restless and depressed, but it wasn’t until I saw him in person that it hit me just how isolated he was. Mostly because of how intimate he’d become with various television shows, particularly “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.”

“I just don’t understand why she didn’t get a flat-screen for the master bedroom,” he said, brow furrowed in genuine bewilderment. “She said she wanted sleek and sexy — but then she goes and gets a rise-up TV?”

I felt compelled to respond even though he wasn’t really talking to me. “Yeah ... I don’t know.”

“I bet Mike talked her into it.” Then, he shook his head ruefully. “Like that guy even has any credentials!”

•

I hadn’t wanted to go. It had been years since my dad and I had hung out, just us two. I worried about what it would be like without the noise of other family around.

The thing is, when I was a teenager, my dad and I had been good buddies. I was him, everyone said. A mini-him. I was into the things that mattered to him: politics, debate, all that. Back then it really looked as though I was becoming a chip off the old block.

Gradually, though, it stopped being that way. During my 20s there were endless fights, fights that were truly harrowing and unnerving, like the one that exploded the day before my wedding. The topic — would we or would we not perform our father-daughter dance to the hideous “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” — was silly. But the battle itself was disconcertingly stormy and thoughts of it still make my stomach churn.

These days, though, there’s quiet. And distance. There’s the fact that I live 3,000 miles away. But there’s also that I no longer have his name, I no longer lead a life that resembles his in any discernible way. I knew we loved each other, but there was the distinct possibility that a visit would reveal we didn’t actually like each other much at all.

Yet the weekend came and I found myself there.

“I’m glad to see you,” he said when I arrived. It was the wee hours and he’d shuffled out of bed to greet me, his eyes at half-mast, shoulders slightly hunched. He looked older, I thought. He apologized for needing to head back to bed, but, actually, I was relieved to be left alone.

•

The next day in the TV room, I got a taste of how slowly time passed there. After hours that felt like days, I needed a change of scenery, so I went to the kitchen and embarked on a wildly invigorating cleaning spree. My dad kept me company while I O.C.D.’ed out.

I flat-out adore cleaning, but my parents’ kitchen, loaded with random, useless stuff, was a bit of an adventure. Only once I was done purging things — like year-old Jordan almonds, mildew-y tennis headbands, a sandwich baggie of broken coffee mug — could the actual scrubbing begin in earnest. And that day, amid the counter fray: croutons. Picture a small, clear plastic tub containing maybe five stale-looking croutons. The kind that come with a Caesar salad from a pizza place but that no one on earth has ever actually eaten.

I waved the croutons at my dad as I went to the trash. “I’m throwing these away, O.K.?”

Since it wasn’t really a question, I was surprised when he stopped me.

“Wait,” he said. “Don’t.”

I eyed him quizzically.

“Well,” he said, the tiniest shade of sheepishness creeping into his voice. “What if someone maybe needs them?”

Right. What if someone maybe needs them. Like, down the line. That’s perfect.

•

My parents cannot throw anything away. At the point at which the average person will dispose of an item, my parents will just move it — to the basement, to the attic or simply off to the side. “Go ahead, laugh,” my mom’s always saying. “You don’t know what might come in handy later.”

But personally I don’t see how a papier-mâché head could come in handy later. Or a tower of browning New Yorker magazines. Or a bowl full of keys to nothing, an IV contraption from when the cat had a urinary tract infection or a shiny plastic top hat emblazoned with “Happy New Year! Y2K, you’re O.K.!”

Or croutons.

Me, I’m intensely clutter-averse. I know I get rid of items prematurely, but the pleasure I derive from throwing a thing away probably outweighs the pleasure I’d derive from using that thing down the line. I even like throwing files away on my computer because of that intoxicating sound the trash folder makes.

•

So there I was in my parents’ kitchen, sponge in one hand, croutons in the other, just standing there with my skinny-legged, reality-television-obsessed dad. And suddenly this rumbling laugh bubbled up from deep inside me and once it started it would not stop. My dad joined in, giggling at first, then erupting into his full-blown sputtering/snorting combo and together we just stood there, doubled over and howling for I don’t know how long. Both of us kept trying to speak, but the only word that managed to squeak its way out was “croutons.”

For the next three days, we spent most of our hours back in the TV room. In between shows, and over shows, we talked. There was, of course, lots of discussion about Kathy Griffin (Me: “Maybe she should think about getting an agent who doesn’t avoid her calls?”), but we also covered topics from peacoats (concurring on their classic cuteness) and manicures (life-enhancing and a helpful deterrent for us nail-biters). I walked him through a day in my life in Los Angeles, and at one point found myself talking about how I want to be a writer. Whenever we got hungry I’d heat up food the neighbors brought over, which we’d eat on those tremendously exciting little TV trays.

My dad kept apologizing for being laid-up and unfun. I told him it was O.K., because it was. Anyway, it was possible I was having fun. I guess I must’ve been since I was forgetting to be nervous.

On the day I was leaving, I opened my makeup case to find — nestled innocently inside — the tub of croutons. I screeched with delight and could hear my dad giggling from the TV room. That night, before heading out to the taxi, I put the croutons in his medicine cabinet. Right between the Tinactin and the Ban unscented roll-on.

In the year since, the croutons have seen a lot of action, volleying between the East and West Coasts, hiding, then re-appearing in delightfully cunning places. The U.P.S. delivery was one of my dad’s craftier moves, but it wasn’t half as good as the time I brought the croutons to my cousin’s wedding in Chicago and, in an electrifying coup, had one of the waiters serve the croutons to my dad beside his salad. Right now that little plastic tub is back in Dad’s possession, but I’m pretty sure I’m onto his game plan: he’s having the croutons lay low in the hopes that I’ll forget about them. He thinks he can catch me off guard and fully blow my mind with the next Crouton Appearance.

And to that I say: bring it on.