As my kids grow older, I find they share some of the character traits of not only myself, but other members of my family.
For the sake of keeping familial relations on good terms, I will not share my thoughts on the subject… or all of them, at least.
My daughter and my wife, for instance, share several character traits. So much so, in fact, that my wife will apologize at times when our daughter does something extremely goofy – or won’t have a serious conversation about an issue.
“That’s me, I’m sorry,” she’ll say.
My oldest son, on the other hand, can be stubborn like I can be.
I, too, will apologize when the time comes.
“That’s the Wilson in him,” I’ll say.
My mother has been known to throw similar lines out, from time to time, when it comes to how her family acts, noting “that’s the King” or “that’s the Dettman” in them.
Then there is my middle child, Duncan, who is an eclectic mix of our entire family.
He loves sports (me), wearing stylish clothing (his uncle), being goofy (his mother), and cooking (his grandfather).
He is also a collector, like his late great-grandfather… or, as I prefer to call him, “The Scrounger.”
Routinely, he will visit his grandparents and “scrounge” through the basement or my old bedroom, looking for some long-lost treasure (is it, really?) and re-appearing in front of us all, saying, “Can I keep this?”
I will say, “No.” My parents, more often than not, will say, “Yes.”
Why? Because it gets the stuff out of their house, and into mine.
This is usually not a huge problem, because the items are relatively small.
However, over the Thanksgiving weekend, we travelled to my wife’s hometown of Fort Erie to overdose on turkey and help do some clean up at her late grandfather’s home.
As I have written about before, at Christmas last year “Scrounger” was in his glory, looking for all sorts of treasures (or “tchotchkes” as my wife’s family calls them), and then convincing me to find a spot for them in the car on the way home.
“Papa” was a collector… and his collection is quite large.
After the family went through the basement at Christmas, I figured all of the “good” stuff was gone.
Alas, I was wrong.
Duncan immersed himself in the basement clean up, uncovering more tchotchkes that some of us didn’t even know about.
After an hour or two of rummaging around, he came upstairs with a chess board, a portable cassette player and… a wooden duck.
The chess board had no game pieces, the cassette player had no cassettes, and the wooden duck was… a wooden duck.
“What are you going to do with that stuff?” I asked.
“I want to find the playing pieces for the chess board, but I can’t find them. And I have no idea what goes in this thing,” he said, holding up the cassette player, “but it looks cool.”
“What about the duck? What the heck are you going to use a wooden duck for?” I asked.
“It’s a duck!” he replied. “Why wouldn’t I want a duck?”
Not having an answer for him, I kept on doing what I was doing. A little while later, “Scrounger” reappeared having found cassettes – and apparently having learned what a cassette player is for.
“How the heck do these fit in this thing?” he asked.
He held up the “cassette.” It was an 8-track.
“That’s for something completely different,” I told him.
We returned to the basement, where we found some cassettes for him to take to go with his new-found technology. After further digging, we found the missing pieces for the chess board, and all was well.
After eating far too much turkey, we went to the car to head back to my in-laws. We opened the back door to put the new treasures in, only to find some additional items had been “snuck” in.
I glanced at the Scrounger, and without missing a beat he said, “What? It’s good stuff!”
He is his great-grandfather’s great-grandson, there’s no doubt about it.
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Mike Wilson is the editor of Midwestern Newspapers. Comments and feedback are welcome at mwilson@midwesternnewspapers.com.
