For father’s day, I called up this

residential deck cleaning

service and hired them to go and rinse out the deck at the back of my parents’ house. I don’t know if they’d ever had that done in all the years they have lived there. But now the back deck looks good as new and they could even host BBQs out there if they ever had any. My parents have never been too social. When I was growing up in their house, I never even knew any of our neighbors. Sure, I saw them around. That was inevitable, but I never knew any of their names or what they did. The metra train ran near the house so there were these elevated train tracks nearby. Most of my friends lived on the other side of the train tracks, though it was really all the same neighborhood. One of my friends’ dads told me that when he was a kid those train tracks might have meant something and divide up the neighborhood. The kids would play baseball against each other and compete and be rivals over everything. I’ve never thought that way. I actually always wondered why my parents were never too friendly. Maybe they thought they were better than everyone else.