Watcher

We call my father “The Watcher” because he is extremely quiet in social settings. He likes to observe other people’s behavior and he occasionally makes a cute little comment. Aside from being a watcher, my father is also a prankster and he is also very naïve. This is a very dangerous combination. Every year, my father gives money as gifts and the money is always presented in unusual ways.

One year, the watcher put one-hundred single dollar bills in a book. They were not placed neatly in the front or the back of the book, but they were awkwardly folded and hidden throughout the text. He said that he just wanted to make sure that I read the book from cover to cover. He did not want to waste good money on a book I would never read. It took me quite awhile to extract the money from the book and it did give me incentive to read it thoroughly, just in case.

The first unusual watcher money gift I got was presented in a large ball surrounded by aluminum foil. The ball looked like a large serving of Jiffy Pop Popcorn. When I tore the aluminum foil, I found that the watcher waded up a hundred dollar bills into little balls and wrapped them in the foil. Needless to say, it took me hours to unfold each bill and the money was very fluffy. It lay in a huge, unmanageable stack on my coffee table. Ironically, I used a book to press the money flat. This didn’t work, so I just spent the wrinkled cash as quickly as possible.

When we arrived at my father’s home on Christmas Eve, I saw several large aluminum foil balls hanging from the tree. I thought that the watcher was running out of ideas. I was very wrong. We found that my father had taken the time to roll each dollar bill into a thin cylinder which he placed into a straw that he cut to size. He then squeezed each straw into a large Styrofoam ball and covered the ball with aluminum foil.

My father was way too naïve to realize what this would look like when we took our money out of the Styrofoam balls. My living room looked like Kate Moss’ hotel suite. There were rolls of bills piled on my coffee table surrounded by literally hundreds of straws cut to size. All of this was covered by the white flakes of Styrofoam. Evidently the watcher keeps his observations to his family. I don’t think he even knows who Kate Moss is.