The Question on Repeat

What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.

My current most-hated question is, “So—when are you going to retire?”

My father asks it every time I see him. He’s ninety-six, and he asks it with the casual confidence of a man who thinks this is a normal question, like commenting on the weather. I brace myself anyway, because it lands in that strange place where something can be funny and not funny at the same time. “When I pay off the mortgage,” I say, like I’m reading a line from a play we’ve performed so often I could do it in my sleep.

He either doesn’t remember my answer, or he remembers it and asks anyway because it’s the doorway he needs. Retirement is not really the topic; retirement is the segue. “I retired at sixty,” he says, and the conversation slides off my life and back into his—into that well-worn story of relief and freedom. I nod, half listening, half doing the quiet arithmetic of my own life, and feeling the faint embarrassment of it.

My brother gets the same question. Every time. We exchange a look that is half comedy and half fatigue, as if we are watching the same scene repeat and are unsure whether we are meant to laugh or groan. It is wearisome and a little embarrassing, not because he is old, but because the question exposes me: the unfinished business of adulthood, the way money still tugs on the sleeve of freedom.

And yet I let it happen. At ninety-six, a man is allowed his idiosyncrasies. If it weren’t this question, it would be another—something equally personal, equally blunt, equally impossible to answer without embarrassment. This is the arrangement, I think: he offers me his loop of memory, and I offer him my patience. I deliver my line. He delivers his. We keep going, tandem-style, looking a little ridiculous, and loving each other anyway.

Daily writing prompt

What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.

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