Dad:  What are all the packages?
Me: Socks.  I finished my 12 part sock bracket and the Thorlo Unisex Wool padded hiker and Wigwam Merino Wool comfort hiker socks won.  I guess it was more efficient to have four smaller boxes or they came from different sources.
Dad:  I wish you had told me.
Me: About my socks?
Dad: Yes, I just purchased 12 pair of crappy Hanes when I realized that life was too short to wear bad socks.
Me:  You can always give the socks to Max [our dog, a prodigious thief of socks. -Ed.], he’d love you forever if you did.
Dad: He’s a dog, he already does.
Me: But now he’d love you forever, and have a sock to show for it.

My brother has made a coordinated effort to maintain contact with our maternal grandmother who lives outside of Atlantic City, NJ.  After 50 years she still has a strong brogue and never got her citizenship which puts her at odds with some diminutive Sicilian in her apartment complex that keeps threatening to submit her to ICE, apparently not realizing that there is a large space between citizen and illegal alien and his miss of this is rendered even more farcical by the fact that he himself is not native born.

Regardless, Ryan has done admirably in keeping her up to date in the goings of our lives and even does a passable impression of a late octogenarian Irish expat when relating stories and once I found particularly moving.  When my parents were getting married, she questioned the wisdom of my Catholic mother marrying a generic Protestant as she still describes such non-specific members of the Jesus Brigade the cause of the The Troubles that had occurred from her birth to the time of her emigration.  This dislike had apparently worn away over the decades as my brother mentioned that he was now a Methodist to which she simply responded with an emphatic and genuine “Good for you”.  There’s also the non-trivial likelihood that she’s not familiar with Methodism, but I’ll take my chances.