25. Break-in at Brookstone
Today is 15 days from the first anniversary of Dad’s passing. I’ve committed to writing 40 stories about him as that day approaches. Forty Steady Stories.
In April 2010, Dad and Mom took Emma and me to Charleston for a couples’ weekend three weeks before Mother’s Day. After lunch on one of the days, we all went to our standard daily stop Häagen Dazs Ice Cream Shop on the corner of S. Market and State Street.
(Sidebar: There is a LEGENDARY story about my mom from that store that all the employees knew about because it made their “wall of customer stories,” but I can’t tell that one now.)
Then Dad and I took off on our own, walked around the city talking and taking pictures together, and then stopped off at the Brookstone store to look at their widgets and gadgets. For those who don’t know or remember, before Brookstone filed bankruptcy and disappeared from malls (like SouthPark), they had a bunch of cool doodads in their stores. Virtually all their products were stuff you didn’t need — at least until you went in the store and discovered what you’d been missing and desperately needed in your car or closet until that next garage sale in your driveway.
But Dad LOVED gadgets all his life and passed that down to me for sure. So, in we went after two scoops at Häagen-Dazs and a few miles of walking. I could tell Dad was a little tired. We walked around the Brookstone aisles looking at everything and then Dad decided to try out the massage chair in the front of the store. I’m too much of an introvert to sit at the front of a Brookstone store and watch people watching me sit in a massage chair, so I told Dad I was going to check out one of the other stores and come back in a few minutes.
I think I got held up at the other store getting something for the kids, but I remember coming back about 15 minutes later. And there was Dad in his sunglasses — with a dinkshooter around his neck resting on a neon yellow shirt, wrapped in a fishing vest, and topped with a Tilley hat.
He was completely asleep and had not moved from when I’d left. Except for the rising and falling of the dinkshooter on his stomach and the movement caused by the massage chair, he looked like a store mannequin. I started to laugh but held it in long enough to raise my own dinkshooter for the shot above.
It took me a minute to wake him with the store employees looking at me very gratefully that they didn’t have to. He woke up and played it so cool like he’d been just resting his eyes, but it was clear he’d been counting sheep while he broke-in the chair.
* * *
As I’ve mentioned before, Dad became so much more free about who he was as he got older. He began to care less and less about moments like the one in the Brookstone store and how he was perceived by others. I’m sure some of it was the change due to his pituitary/brain surgeries twelve years earlier, but I think a lot of it was he just got comfortable being himself. He truly became more and more real as time went on. He never stopped laughing and loving our family.
I have a bunch of his gadget and doodad hand-me-downs behind me on my bookshelf — including a couple of dinkshooters. Countless more widgets are in boxes. I’m just not ready to part with them because they remind me of moments, the man, and the journey we took together — particularly the last several years.
I suppose part of why I hang to some of these things is because I still wish that I had just a few more moments with him. Maybe this time, I’d sit down in the massage chair beside him and let people go ahead and walk around us.
