Free Assisted Loving by Bob Morris Page B

ridiculous,” he says.
    â€œNo, seriously, there’s a Dinah Shore golf classic in Palm Springs every year that’s a big lesbian event. How do you explain that if she wasn’t?”
    â€œFoolishness,” he says. “You don’t have your facts straight. No pun intended.”
    He’s not at all homophobic. But don’t go messing with one of his icons. Dinah Shore, in her prime, was his ultimate goddess. The show he taped is a retrospective of her series from the 1960s, and it’s called Mwah because that’s the sound she made when she threw kisses. It’s a mix of easy, breezy musical numbers suggesting that life is a bowl of cherries, or perhaps a can of fruit cocktail in heavy syrup. It’s so upbeat and white bread—totallyDad in its gestalt—that I find the kitsch quasi-compelling. How could anybody give off such relentless optimism? She knew how to blend with a man, too, show him off rather than outshine him. When she sings duets with Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, looking totally enamored in her pearls and impeccable poofy dresses, with bottle-blond hair so coiffed, I can’t help but see my mother at her loveliest. She was a woman who knew how to let others shine, too. We watch the show together for an hour. The ease, the patter, the tuxedos and chiffon, it’s all so soothing that it takes the edge off our night. Then it’s over and time for me to go home. I put on my windbreaker.
    â€œWhy are you leaving?” Dad asks. “Spend the night! I’ve got an extra room.”
    I tell him that I can’t and that I have to get home, even though I don’t. I don’t have anyone to go home to. I haven’t had a date all spring.
    â€œI could really use the company,” he says.
    Now I’m irked. First of all, the last thing I want is to wake up to him shuffling around in his pajamas in the morning, blowing his nose and pouring orange juice over his cornflakes. And the presumption is a little painful. I mean, why does he think that just because I don’t have a wife and family that I’m at his beck and call, free to spend the night in this building of sclerotic seniors?
    â€œI do have a life, Dad, you know.”
    â€œI know you do, Bobby.”
    â€œJust because I don’t have a day job, family, two homes, and tennis habit, like some people we know, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have things to do with my life.”
    â€œSo I guess my idea won’t intrigue you.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œGetting a house where we could live together.”
    â€œHuh? Where?”
    â€œSomewhere that appeals to you, like the Hamptons.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with this place for you?”
    â€œIt’s for old people,” he says. “I’m not ready for this yet.”
    Living with my father, I know, is both a nice idea and a terrible one. Just imagining what the kitchen would look like makes me queasy. And when I’d have the occasional date, would he need to know about it? Would I be cooking for him? Washing his underwear? Of course, in an abstract sense, I admire all the cultures that revere elders enough to keep them close. Plenty of Americans take their parents into their homes, too, some for economic reasons, others because of compassion. When my mother’s father was unable to live alone upstate in Utica in the 1980s, he moved to our Long Island house. He was a crusty old guy, a handball player and amateur boxer, who had a tendency to tease the cat and bend your ear with banalities. He was my only living grandparent, but—call me picky—not the kind I would have selected for myself had I been given a catalogue. He spent hours loitering at our kitchen table, tapping his fingers, with nothing to do but talk. I wasn’t as nice as I could have been. But my father treated him with nothing but warmth and respect.
    For a moment I envision my father and me living together