Gnats Are A Universe Unto Themselves Apparently (or I Have Fairies In My Kitchen)

I feel:: amused... now




I live with my Dad (who is 76) and we have a gnat problem. (Me= bugphobic) So, I was thinking about ways to solve it for a few days and one morning just after I woke up, I found Dad sitting in his usual place, the recliner, doing his usual thing, the crossword puzzle out of that day's paper. So, I stopped to talk to him for a minute about our gnat problem.

Let me just say first a little about my dad's habits regarding the opening and closing of windows and doors. We keep the air conditioner set on 72 or 73 degrees all the time, yet my dad will open his bedroom window wide enough for a grown person to climb out of it, open the kitchen window over the sink, open the back door in the morning (that's the side of the house that gets all of the sun pretty much all day until about 4pm or so, then it hits the front of the house) and slide up the glass window that is over the window screen on the storm door that we have which leads out into the back yard. So, just to set the record straight- every day, all day, while the air conditioner is running my dad has three windows open on the side of the house that gets most of the heat.

Let me just ask y'all this: When you were growing up, did you ever hear your parents say things like, "Shut the door! We are not trying to air condition the entire neighborhood!" or "You can either come in or out! You're letting the bugs in!" or "Shut the door! You weren't raised in barn!" I heard all of these in my childhood and many more. As many as my parents' imaginations could come up with. Add to this that when Dad and I first moved into this house, he nagged me forever like a mosquito in my ear about getting curtains for the windows so that the house wouldn't be so hot in the summer and not so cold in the winter (He wanted the really thick kind of curtains. The kind that, when you close them, you're ushered into a kind of eerie darkness during the day and at night, utter darkness.). Even after I got the curtains and hung them all, (I did it without a drill. I had to hand screw the anchors and screws into the walls. Only when I was on the last set of curtains and I was so frustrated that my hands were shaking nearly uncontrollably did I hear Dad say, "Hey, do you want to use my drill?" Sometimes, I think he gets a perverse amusement out of seeing me completely and utterly frustrated.) he was still complaining about the fact that the kitchen window and the window on the back door had no curtains. He bitched about that for at least the first 6 months we lived here.

Keeping in mind all of the previously said, here is the nearly word-for-word conversation I had with my dad a couple of days ago about our gnat problem:

Me: "Hey Dad, I was thinking about how to fix our gnat problem."
Him: (Looks up from his crossword unexpectantly) "Oh, really?"
Me: (proceeding with caution) "I've been noticing that you always open the kitchen window and the window on the back door every day and keep them open all day. I was thinking that if they were closed, we wouldn't have this gnat problem."
Him: (Going back to his crossword and not looking at me.) "That doesn't have anything to do with our gnat problem."
Me:(trying unsuccessfully not to be a bit sarcastic) "So, where do you suppose they come from?"
Him: "Gnats don't come from anywhere. They create themselves."
Me: (Standing in front of his recliner in utter disbelief,stuttering,eyebrows once again disappearing into hairline,looking at Dad like he's fallen completely off his rocker, while trying very hard not to laugh): "Y..You..re..(clearing throat) really, really believe that?"
Him: (Looking up again from his crossword,over the top of his trifocal glasses, in all seriousness.) "Yes."
Me: (releasing a very long,very theatrical sigh complete with my patented defeated-looking sagging of shoulders) "Ooookaay, then."

At this point, all I could do was walk away into the kitchen to start making coffee and take my morning meds in hopes that the combination of Prozac, Klonopin and caffeine would somehow wake me from this surreal conversation I had just had. A few minutes later and while I was staring absently at the coffee maker wishing that the coffee was already done, I hear Dad yell from his recliner, "I have to have fresh air!" So, I yell back nonchalantly, "Then go outside."

This is by far the weirdest conversation I have ever had with my Dad. This surpasses even the one when he was doped up in the ER, having broken the large bone in his thigh due to a drunken fall, when he told me that my grandmother (his mother) had run off to join the circus to become a "hoochie coochie" dancer when she was 17, leaving my dad with her parents to raise. Pain meds are quite the soothsaying drug.

Is it just me, or do y'all have weird-ass conversations with your parents like that?

Just to show y'all I'm not crazy.
Linkage:
University of Kentucky Entomology