My mother used to make me smell things in the grocery store for her. I was the director of fruits from the market to our counter, flowers from her garden to flattering bouquets, and dairy from the fridge to the sink.
My father gets angry whenever he can't find a drill, or a saw or anything else. Nothing frustrates him more than searching. He leaves a pretty expensive collection of carefully crafted pieces of metal and wire in bins on our porch, and spends more time worrying about them being stolen than using them. My mother, on the other hand, laughed uncomfortably when I told her about sleeping on the back of the Greyhound, next to the bathroom, on the triple seat. I had ruined some of her tools, used a sander to file metal, clogged her pressure washer with concrete. Who knows what might come next. It would probably be worst of all if I couldn't open a jar of pickles. I wish I could say this was a metaphor.