Father's Day
This Fathers’ Day, I bought my dad two bottles of expensive port wine. He loves port, mostly because it’s extremely sweet and red. He read somewhere that red wine is healthy and insists that his nightly ritual of drinking a large glass of port while watching FOX pundits is good for him. The wine might be, in a smaller glass.
He started drinking a glass of wine, especially port, in the evenings in the last few years of my mother’s life. I suspect that was his way of coping with the stress of her dementia and physical decline. Now, he just likes it. He’s also perfectly happy with a cheap brand that comes in a magnum bottle; he does appreciate expensive brands though he will rarely spend his own money on the quality stuff.
As a Type 2 Diabetic, Dad can’t indulge his love of sweets the way he used to, so a very sweet wine like port fills that void a bit. (Not that wine is much better for a diabetic.) He also read somewhere that one beer a day is good for you because of the fermentation. “A beer a day is good for your heart, just like red wine,” he likes to say. Therefore, he insists on having one lite beer every day when he gets home from exercising at the community center because: “It’s good for me. It’s healthy.” (That’s relative. Long term consumption of alcohol is very unhealthy, even if a few beers or a glass of wine in the short term have benefits for the heart; wine and beer also contain carbs, so diabetics should not be drinking them, especially beer, though the lite versions are relatively better than regular beer, and wine has less carbs than most other alcohols.)
While he is generally pretty good about his diet, he loves chocolate and has, in his own mind, created a work-around for his diabetic limitations. “Dark chocolate is good for you,” he says. “It has less sugar in it than the other stuff, and it’s healthy, so the sugar doesn’t count.” (While it does have less sugar than milk chocolate, that’s just relative. It still contains a lot of sugar, and diabetics should not be eating it.) He keeps a stash of dark chocolate candy in a drawer in the kitchen which he raids at night when I’m in my room with the door closed trying not to hear his FOX programs.
Dad has the proverbial “sweet tooth.” My siblings and I all inherited that from him, unfortunately. To be fair, my mother loved sweets, too, but she was not the chocoholic my father and the rest of us are. Diabetes has been difficult for him because of that, but he has actually managed to control it well with just diet and exercise. He is very good about going for a short walk every day and also going to the local community center to exercise in the gym and swim laps in the pool. (Yes, even at ninety-five he’s still doing those things.) He also is careful about most of his diet. I try hard to cook only things without carbs for him. He just can’t resist certain things like wine, chocolate (and other sweets), and beer. His other children and grandchildren tend to enable him in this. I used to get angry and give them a hard time about that, but I’ve given up. His heart and old age will probably kill him sooner than diabetes, relatively speaking, so he might as well enjoy the few pleasures he has left. He manages to keep his blood sugar level under 140, though sometimes it sneaks up pretty close, so he’s doing fine, so far. (He tests his blood every morning.)
My brother came to visit for Fathers’ Day. We agreed that I would buy the ingredients for dinner and dessert, and he would cook them. (He’s a priest, so he makes even less money than a retired teacher because he makes nothing. Now you know there’s at least one professional vocation that pays even less than teaching. He voluntarily took a vow of poverty, though, so I’m not sure that counts.) He’s also a much better cook than I am. I splurged and bought scallops, crab cakes, and even one lobster tail Dad shared with my brother. (I’m a vegetarian. I ate salad. And dessert. I saved lots of room for dessert because I inherited that desire for sweet things.)
Dad also loves seafood. My mother was allergic to all shellfish, so while she was alive, he only got it when they went out to a restaurant, which they didn’t do very often. (Well, they raised five kids. That limited their ability to do things like go out to restaurants much.) I don’t know if we’ll have another Fathers’ Day with him (he’s going to be ninety-six soon), so I figured it was worth going broke for a few weeks to make him happy. I also bought three different kinds of cheesecake from a place in the next town over that makes the most delicious cheesecakes and chocolate chip cookies ever baked except, of course, for my mother’s. (I have to say that because I don’t want her insulted ghost haunting me.) Cheesecake contains lots of protein and fat to counteract the sugar in it, so it’s okay for diabetics, right? My father swears it’s healthy. My brother and I helped him eat it, which limited how much of it he could eat so his blood sugar couldn’t go too high. ‘Just doing our filial duty.