When Dad was about my age now, he and mom started picking up a local elderly lady to take her to mass on Sundays. Let’s call her Mrs Grover, that’s close enough. She was a goodhearted woman and it was a pleasure to Mom and Dad to be able to help her out. They also took her shopping on a regular basis and it was not uncommon for dad to wait in the car while Mom and mrs Grover shopped.

They’d come back to the car and find dad curled up against the door snoring like a bandsaw, out like a light. So Mrs grover thought, here’s my chance to do something nice for him for taking me all over the place!

So she crochets a pillow. It’s a little round thing, green on one side and rust colored on the other side, and about a foot in diameter, maybe six inches thick.

Let me back up a minute here, and say, though Mrs grover might have been an attractive woman at one time, just getting a gander at her at that time would force a normal man to take a vow of celibacy, and her visage was used by the Romanian militia to discourage randiness in the ranks. She was as unattractive as a year is long, and god bless her, she knew it. You’d have to bite your tongue when she commented that she’d grown old and ugly, and it took all your willpower to deny it, though it was the plainest lie to do so. God made Mrs Grover to be an example to all who would die young and leave an attractive corpse; when she died, years later, even she requested a closed coffin. Nobody fought the matter, either.

Anyway, she gave Dad the pillow the sunday after she’d made it, and it made Dad’s life immeasurably easier. he carried that pillow in his car till he died, and every time he’d go shopping with Mom and Mrs Grover, he’d prop the pillow up against the window of the car, snuggle up to it, and doze off.

Years of doing this, every weekend he’d thank her for the wonderful gift, she’d be embarrassed at his thanks, but happy she’d done something to please him so well, and he was so genuinely pleased.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Mom is genetically programmed to clean, compulsively, anything that she sees, and one day she asked Mrs Grover “Is that yarn washable? Can I take out the stuffing and wash it?” mrs Grover says, “Oh, just toss the whole thing in the washer, just don’t heat dry it, wring it out and dry it on “cold” Mom says “Won’t that harm the foam inside?” Mrs grover responds “Oh, no, there’s no foam, I just filled it full of my old panty hose”

The look on my father’s face is a legend in northwest Indiana to this day. For several years, every sunday and many other weekdays besides, he’d been napping with his face pressed against this hideous old bat’s used pantyhose, and had no idea about it at all. Now that he did, he wanted to un-know it as soon as possible, and that just wasn’t happening.
Mom cleaned it and stuffed it with foam from a craft store, but it never was (according to Dad) quite as comfortable as it was before, though it was certainly more…. tasteful and sanitary.