I had a phone conversation with my Dad last night and that’s always an interesting time. Since he’s had major hearing loss this past year, I only talk to him on rare occasions.

He did finally break down and purchase a good quality set of hearing aides but he’s having trouble adjusting to which external noises are now blaring loud and which ones are still not loud enough.

In any case, a phone conversation with him is like that meme I saw years ago that goes something like “just got off the phone with my dad…he had a nice conversation”. In other words, he does most of the talking, which I’m fine with. He did talk for a long time about his disappointment in the hearing aides and analyzed it from every angle. Same conversation we (he) had about six months ago.

At one point he said “I can hear you pretty well right now on the phone”, and I thought to myself, I’ve barely said a word but okay. Insert laughing emoji.

I asked him how my Aunty Janice is doing and if he’s talked to her lately and he said Aunty, you mean Aunt, why are you calling her Aunty. We didn’t teach you to say aunty, we taught you to say aunt. Aunty was the way the really Ukrainian people spoke. I said Dad, actually you didn’t want us calling our aunts “aunt” or “aunty”, you said right from when we were small that was so formal and just calling them Judy and Janice was fine.

Then I realized how silly that had been and that I’d forgotten all about it. But it actually was that way. He specifically told us to only call them by their first names and not to use any titles. I remember my Aunty Judy getting mad at him when I was a kid, saying to him why can’t they call me Aunty Judy??

He’s so strange sometimes. He seemed to forget that it was that way until I mentioned it and even then he didn’t seem to want to discuss it.

My older sister and I realized we didn’t use the words Aunt or Aunty in high school and decided for ourselves that we’d quite like to be like other people and refer to these older women whom we looked up to as Aunty Judy and Aunty Janice and so we started referring to them as such, our own doing.