I Miss Marvin

It goes back a few years, but I remember times when (like a few other dads) I used to wait up for one or another of our daughters to come home from a date. Most of the time they were pretty good about getting home on time - but there also were times when they got home a bit late. I remember one time in particular - our eldest was quite late and I was sitting on the stairs so there was no way she could sneak upstairs to bed without getting caught. She was not a happy camper.


But neither was my mother when I would come back in from a square dance that ended at 1 a.m. at four a.m. or later. Or there was the prom on graduation night when it was close to dawn or after. In fact, that episode was made even more exciting when Mom looked down the stairs to the bedroom and saw two curly heads in bed and she screamed "He's got a girl with him!" (My friends' hair was long enough to have been a girls) I remember abruptly waking up to her scream and I shouted back, "It's not a girl mom - it's Richard!" I sometimes brought Richard home to reduce the parental screaming when I came home and even then the screaming ('Where have you been all this time?') came after I took him home where he went through his own parental chastisement.


In addition, she never accepted the fact that it took hours to drop off my friends whose homes were all over the northern half of our county. That just went with being one of the few in my class with a car - which was more an incentive than my sparkling (?) personality.


Which goes to say that 'what goes around comes around'. We've had times when our children wonder why we are not home when they call. In the old days our parents worried about us when we were out late - and now our children worry about us when we don't answer the phone after nine-thirty at night. But kids, don't fret -we probably were in bed by nine. For sure, we weren't out running around or out at a lovers lane on some back road. But it sounds like an interesting idea.

By the way, the cartoon strip is by one of my favorite cartoonists, Tom Armstrong.
He and his family were members of our church in Bradenton, Florida and I really enjoyed knowing them. He really saw life in a wonderful way and this strip was a gift to us when I retired in Florida. I miss them and I miss his character Marvin.
We always could see a little of our own lives in Tom's humor.