Sunday, I broke down and did something I swore I never would: I bought TV trays.

I admitted to myself, finally, that I watch TV while I eat. Not always, mind you. But sometimes. And sometimes ... with my son.

Yes, I know, dinner time with my son should be a time of conversation, bonding and all that. But with just two of us, frankly, sometimes the conversation quickly runs dry. Our "bonding" conversations like as not take place in the car or while we're walking the dog, rarely over the dinner table. But perhaps the volume of the TV has something to do with that.

Whatever, as long as he agrees to watch "Animal Planet," I'll often concede on TV-with-dinner.

For years, I've denied it was an issue, or, some might say, a problem. So instead of buying and using TV trays, we balanced plates and glasses on the couch seats, on the arms, on the pillows - anywhere but on a solid surface. I placed wine and milk glasses on the floor between bites.

Sometimes, as you might imagine, food slipped off plates. Wine spilled. Ice cream overflowed the bowl and melted. The cushions took a beating. Thank God, they're red, a color that can take a licking and still look surprisingly festive and clean. Time and again, it shrugs off milk, beer, butter, fried chicken and vino stains, and essentially says, "Party on!" It is ever-ready to host another dinner party on its happy red countenance.

The carpet is not so hospitable. It's far less forgiving of social gatherings, I-can-party-just-fine-by-myself-damnit nights, muddy animal paws or boy children. But hey, that's what stain removers are for. Furthermore, we're renting. The carpet can go to hell. The couch is ours forever.

And just why the hell do they put white carpet in an apartment anyway? To guarantee forfeiture of the security deposit?

Non-sequiter; my apologies.

I also can justify the purchase of TV trays because they disappear neatly when sandwiched between the back of the couch and the wall. One moment, they're here - folded open, damn near spread-eagled in the living room, obscene, tangible evidence of our American lifestyle at its most shameful. The next, they've vanished, resting serenely behind the couch, where even the rudest guest will never think to look.

In our house, they shall serve more than just the occasional dining need. In order to be trendy, I purchased a few years ago a metal table with rough, rocky tiles. It's beautiful. It's stylish. It's impractical. My son cannot do homework on its uneven surface. I cannot write even so much as my signature without knowing the future reader will suspect I was thoroughly smashed at the time - or that I am very, very old.

The other night, I not only ate - alone - at the TV tray, I sat down afterward and paid bills. The writing surface was smooth. My handwriting appeared eloquent. The sit-coms were funnier than I remembered. Paying bills suddenly seemed fun, very nearly artistic! I did so with maniacal glee, paying every single one in my stack, realizing I'd gone too far only when I saw checks made out to "Will & Grace," and "Seinfeld."

Robby has not yet "met" the TV trays. I am disgusted to realize that I consider this a treat for him, that I know he will love them, and be amazed that I spent my good money on such things.

I know this is twisted and wrong. I also know both of us desperately need to interact more with our fellow human beings.

Thusly, I plan to change the names of these instruments of evil. When he arrives Thursday evening, I plan to thoroughly buffalo him. I will introduce them not as TV trays, but as Portable Academic Workstations. Only when homework is complete, I will instruct, can they be called into service for their secondary purpose, as Nutritional Support Systems.

Since the company that now employs me is a major health insurance provider, I sense a constant, sort of nagging emphasis on good health. You know, green tea in the break room, sunflower seeds and trail mix in the vending machine. That sort of stuff.

Thank God they also believe in coffee. Quality coffee. Where at my last job we all pitched in money to buy massive containers of Folger's, here, Starbucks and Seattle's Best flows from super-heated coffee pots 24/7. This, to me, is a benefit in itself.

Bu they don't stop there. As you might guess, the health insurance benefits are darn good. They can get even better if you prove to the company that you are hale and hearty.

The offer is thus: If you ace a health questionnaire, you get a $114-a-year discount on your total benefits.

This afternoon, I took that test. I was confident that I would get the full benefit, particularly since I planned to tweak the facts a touch to get it. In this case, honesty doesn’t pay.

So I lied. Just a wee bit. About just a few things.

“How often do you consume alcohol?” the computer asked.

Since weekends are not on company time, we all know they don’t count. I searched among the choices for the correct weekday response, which would have read: “Once daily, as a bedtime chaser to one prescription and two herbal sleeping pills.”

It wasn’t there. There also was no space for write-in responses. All I could do, then, was mark the space that came closest to the truth: “Never.”

Really, bad sleep = bad employee, so my habit is more of a boon for the company than anything else. Right?

I moved on.

“How many servings of fruits do you eat a day?”

I thought. There were two in my morning banana/frozen raspberries/peanut butter/ice cream smoothie. And then, nothing for the rest of the day. They were big bananas, however, and I was generous with the frozen fruit. (And the sugar, when the ice cream ran out.)

That added up to … “Five!”

“Vegetables?”

Usually, I had some kind of vegetable with dinner. And often white rice, which counted, of course, since it comes from a plant. As does coffee, now that I think about it.

I wasn’t sure what the best answer would be. Would six make me seem excessive? A little too granola? Perhaps a low-producing employee because of all that wasted bathroom time?

Whatever. More had to be better. “Six!”

By this time, I was on a roll, spinning out of control in my increasingly sticky web of health-related lies. And in the back of my mind, always – the money. Why, $114 a year added up to $4.38 a pay period. The things I could do! The new kinds of wine I could try! I was getting might thirsty at the very idea, which was to be expected since it was 5 o'clock somewhere.

“Moderate exercise each week, at least 30 minutes a day?”

Since I walked the dog daily for 5 or 10 minutes each morning and evening, this was a no-brainer. And not really even a lie. I checked the maximum number.

Vigorous exercise weekly? At least 30 minutes a day?

Sometimes, I suddenly recalled, we had to run from other dogs, which Ally would otherwise attack. Such moments always produced a rush of adrenalin. Besides which, I lived on the third floor. Not to mention all the daily heart pounding involved in maneuvering through city traffic. Don't tell me that's not vigorous!

“Four!”

Stretching, i.e. yoga, Pilates? How many times weekly?

Yoga was something I actually did. And the classes were one hour and 15 minutes long! Surely longer than most, (although in truth, I've never attended a class any shorter than an hour). Which meant two classes a week equaled … Five!

"Do you pull over to take cell phone calls?"

Sheesh, doesn't everyone??

Do you suffer from depression? "No." Was it my fault they didn't ask about manic depression?

I was in the home stretch now. The last question?

“How much do you weigh?”

This was my ace in the hole. For the last couple of years, I’d weighed less than at any time in my life (except for right after that whole nervous breakdown thing; and I can't say that was a particularly flattering look). In fact, people here and there urged me to gain a few pounds.

I plugged the final numbers in and waited for the results.

They came back in seconds.

I looked at my risk factors.

Diet: Low
Alcohol consumption: Low
Fitness: Low

On and on, down and down the list. Until: “Weight: Moderate.”

Underneath, in red letters, was written: “Click here for more information.”

I clicked.

“Did you know being underweight can lead to weakness and fatigue? Poor concentration? Scabies?”

OK, so maybe it didn’t say scabies. I couldn’t really concentrate on the horse pucky I was reading.

“Your discount is $104. To learn more on the ill effects of low weight, and get heart-healthy tips, visit these links.”

I felt angry, disappointed and lighter in the wallet already. I had to recalculate my biweekly take. But that would have to come later. Because I was tired. So very tired. And sort of weak. The test really had taken it out of me.

I closed the computer, closed my eyes, closed my ears to the sound of my growling stomach and took a nap.

A downtown Denver homeless man turned the tables on me a few weeks ago. He gave me money. He pressed eight quarters into my hand and waved away my offer of two $1 bills.

"Tonight's my night," he told me. "I'm happy to help."

I knew I'd lived in Colorado Springs too long when I began to recognize the homeless there. Or maybe, that meant I'd finally lived there long enough. The black guy with the dreadlocks, toothy smile and over-sized trench coat was not a stranger to me, and certainly not someone I feared. He was a part of the community, someone whose face was nearly as familiar to me as the mayor's. If he was mentally ill, drug- or alcohol-addicted, it never showed.

Colorado Springs also had its share of alcoholic and mentally ill homeless folks, people whom you avoided on the sidewalk, whose behavior was erratic, their pleas for cash demanding, sometimes frighteningly insistent. But these, too, I came to recognize.

I don't expect to become as familiar with Denver's homeless as I did with Colorado Springs. The city is too big, and if the first few months are any indication, I will be an irregular downtown visitor. But I suspect I'd recognize my unlikely benefactor again.

I'd been circling the downtown area for nearly 15 minutes on a Wednesday night last month, searching for a parking spot whose fee was not greater than the amount I planned to spend that evening. My friend had long ago arrived at our destination, a margarita bar in Denver's toniest block.

"I'm here," I told her. "I just can't find a place to park!"

Then, I saw it - a metered parking spot about three blocks north of the street on which we were to meet. Downtown meters are free after 8 p.m., so this was a find. All I needed were 10 quarters to feed the thing until it closed its gaping maw for the night.

I did a smashing job of parallel parking, and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

About 10 feet from me stood a man, bending down to pick something up from the gutter. He was bearded and mustached, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt that hung loosely from his thin frame. A shopping cart, only partially filled with a few indistinguishable items, appeared to wait like a weary and loyal steed on the sidewalk next to him.

He looked up, saw me and held out his arm to show me something small and flat in his hand.

"I knew this was gonna happen!," he said. "I've had this feeling all day."

He grinned, so widely I responded in kind.

"I found $45!" he said, pointing into the gutter. "Two twenties here and a five there.

"Thank God! Thank you, God! Thank you, thank you, thank you!"

He wanted, like anyone who makes an extraordinary find or just learns some unexpected good news, to share it with someone. And that was me.

"Wow, that's great," I said, and tried to get a closer look at his eyes. I could see no evidence in them or his manner that he was drunk, drugged or otherwise impaired. He was simply happy. "I bet you need that more than whoever lost it."

"Oh God, I sure do," he said. "I really do."

I had fished out my wallet by then and rummaged in its depths for quarters. I found two.

"I'm gonna have me a good dinner tonight," the man said. "I'm gonna get me some chicken-fried steak and some mashed potatoes. I'm gonna eat good."

He did a little dance on the sidewalk, raising his arms skyward and circling around in an awkward jig.

His joy was infectious, but not enough to distract me from my own plight. I stood, in perplexed frustration, at the meter, uncertain what to do next. Walking three blocks down and back, in high heels, seemed a daunting task.

"Hey," he said. "You need some money?"

I looked at him, not knowing how to respond. "I -"

"I think I got some quarters," he said. "Let me look."

He rummaged in a bag nestled in his shopping cart. "Yeah, I do."

He held out his hand, and I opened mine. Into it he dropped eight quarters.

I protested. "Listen, I've got a couple of dollars. Let me -"

He held up a hand to stop me in mid-sentence. "No. No ma'am. That's on me. Tonight, I've got plenty."

For a moment, he was as distinguished a gentleman as any I had ever met.

"You enjoy your night," he said.

"Well," I said, failing to find more words. "You, too."

"Oh, I will," he said, wrapping his hands around the cart handle and pushing it away from me, down the street. "I sure will. Thank the good Lord."

I walked down the street behind him until he turned left, toward a neon sign that blared, "Diner."

I smiled all the way to the bar, where my friend waited.

"There you are!" she said. "I wish you'd been here earlier. I parked my car and when I got out, this big, old homeless guy was standing there. He asked me for money and when I said 'no,' he kicked the meter and started muttering to himself. I thought he might get violent. These guys are so unpredictable."

I agreed. I'd have felt the same way in her position.

But sometimes, albeit rarely, they're unpredictable in a good way.

Tonight, as Denver's first major snowstorm of the season blankets the city with an icy white coat, I thought about the man I've come to think of as MY homeless guy. I hope he's warm, comfortable, well-protected from the elements, and full to the brim of chicken-fried steak.

My mom has more than once said my father's never had a day of fun in his life. I hope my mother is wrong, but since she's lived with him for 50 years, I'm thinking she has a pretty good handle on this subject. I just hope that somewhere in the 35 years before they married, he had a couple good days of fun.

I hope he has scandalous secrets about which I don't know, things that still make him smile when he thinks no one's looking. My brother says he has some stories about nights out with buddies, but I suspect my dad was a spectator, and not a participant in most of the goings-on.

My father's 86 now, no less a curmudgeon than he was while my siblings and I grew up on the family farm, just an older one.

Instead of talking about farming, now he talks about bowel movements.

My dad was the only one home when I arrived at my parents' house earlier this summer for my mom's 80th birthday celebration. He hugged me. He hugged Robby. I asked him how he was, and he said he wasn't feeling so good.

"The god-damn doctor gave me pills that made me constipated," he said. "I took a laxative and but that just made me go a little, and nothing since. Damn straining irritated my hemorrhoids; they're all flared up. Christ."

He wrapped the whole sordid tale up saying, again, "I'm not feeling so damn good."

He told me all this with a straight face. All within 60 seconds of my walking in the door.

"Well," I said. "That doesn't sound fun."

I was home. And grateful only for the fact that he hadn't told me another story I'd heard: About what happened when the constipation ended. With volcanic effect.

A psychiatrist would have either a field day or a serious headache in attempting to label my father's disorder. From all that I've observed, he's agoraphobic, obsessive compulsive and bipolar.

It's certainly from dad's side of the family that my sisters and I inherited the mental illnesses from which we suffer. All three of us have struggled with depression and bipolar disorder. And you don't have to look very high into the branches of dad's family tree to connect the dots to past generations.

My mom's a good woman, but devoted to my father in a way I find hard to understand. She once told my sister she thought she would grow to love him over the years, but it never happened. She believes her reward for being a good wife to a difficult man will come in a life beyond this one. She is a staunch Catholic and after all these years, I understand why. She can't stop believing, or even question her faith. If she does, all these years of sacrifice will be for naught. To a woman who likes to laugh and has let pass countless opportunities for joy and fun to be by my dad's side, I truly cannot imagine how terrifying a thought that would be.

I respect her for her beliefs, and for how unshakable they are. I believe part of me is envious that she can be so certain when I am so unsure about not just the afterlife, but who or what this Higher Power is that brought us all here and how it plays into our everyday lives.

All that aside, you might guess that their unusual marriage spawned four unusual childhoods. But they were not without laughter.

Because Dad didn't have much fun in his life, he didn't leave much room for us to do so either. My siblings and I had to make do with what we had, and that was a challenge. My son is horrified when I tell him that we played with Jell-O boxes. They were cattle, who roamed the orange carpeted stairs in our farmhouse.

Lights were out at 10 p.m. Sharp. No talking, no going to the bathroom, no getting up, no lights on after that. No exceptions.

My sister and I, who shared a bed until we were well into Catholic elementary school, were regularly chided for giggling after the lights went out. Chided, I suppose, is not quite the right word. "Shut the hell up," my dad would yell down the hall, a phrase that sometimes only inspired us to more, but oh-so-carefully suppressed, laughter.

A light left glowing at 10:01 garnered a similar angry outburst. "Shut that god-damn light out!" Followed by the soft click of a light going off.

My Chicago cousins, who visited often during our growing-up years, tell me that one night - for what bizarre reason, I cannot imagine - Dad was out late. Past our bedtimes. They say we plotted this all out before bed, and when Dad came home, turning on lights downstairs while the rest of us lay in darkness, they waited for me to speak my line. I did, shouting down the stairs, "Shut off that god-damn light!"

Silence ensued - broken only by the sound of beds shaking as their occupants attempted to stifle laughter. Dad never said a word.

My mom was subject to these rules as well. During my childhood, she slept alone in a bedrooms downstairs, one level removed from Dad. It was a normal arrangement that no one questioned. Mom kept a coffee can under her bed. This wasn't a spittoon, though not even the saints in which she so firmly believes would have blamed her for taking up that or some other addiction to escape the strange world into which she'd married. No, the can was her bathroom during the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. night shift.

Mom knew well the creaky seventh stair. She did not even attempt to cross it.

Not so my friend Mary and I. Mary stayed overnight at my house only one time that I can recall. Though we're friends to this day, I think that experience was quite enough for her.

Mom let us sleep downstairs in her bed whenever friends stayed overnight. We settled in, whispering and laughing quietly after 10 p.m. This was a deliciously forbidden treat for me; being downstairs gave us an auditory advantage over my father. He couldn't hear our conversation, but he could hear plenty else. As the two of us wound down, Mary announced that she had to go to the bathroom.

"There's a can under the bed," I told her.

"What for?" she asked, eyes growing wide.

"To pee in," I said, a bit disgusted that I had even to explain this to her. Didn't everyone's mom pee in a can at night?

"I'm not peeing in that," she said. "I'm going to the bathroom."

Mary could not be dissuaded, despite my many warnings that the journey upstairs would be a perilous one.

"OK, then I'm going with you," I said, and we tiptoed together out of my mother's bedroom. Both of us instinctively assumed the crawl position, creeping step by step up, not just suppressing our laughter, but holding our breath. We were five steps from the top when a stair creaked. Both of us froze, dead silent. For a moment, we thought the sound had gone unnoticed.

Mary raised a hand to move to the next step. "Get back downstairs and get the hell to bed!" my father's voice boomed.

We retreated, wordlessly, back down the stairs, walking upright this time.

I closed Mom's bedroom door and shook my head in defeat. "Sorry, Mary, it's can time."

Mary shook her head. "I just won't pee," she said. "Let's go to sleep."

Twenty minutes later, she shook my shoulder. "OK, I've really gotta go. Will you go with me again?"

"Mary! Don't be stupid. He's just laying there waiting for us. Just pee in the can!"

"Fine," she said, "then I'll go by myself."

But this I couldn't allow. It was dangerous territory, and I knew it best. If we were to go down in defeat again, we'd do it together.

This time, we agreed to skip the seventh stair. It seemed an ingenious plan. Both of us lifted our hands from the sixth to the eighth. No sound. I grinned at Mary in the dark. Then both our knees hit the seventh stair.

This time, the voice came quickly, and like a thunderclap. "God-damnit, I said get the hell to bed, you god-damn kids!"

That night, Mary peed in a can, for the first - and last - time. After that, all the overnights were at her house, where we stayed up late, sat outside and scared ourselves silly with the certainty that we'd seen UFOs. We shut off all the lights in her bedroom and sang and danced to the Jackson 5's "Dancing Machine." Mary would prove to me she was meant to be with Leif Garrett because her lips matched perfectly with his when she pressed them to the full-length poster on her bedroom wall. We read aloud the definition of "sex" from the S encyclopedia. We made snickerdoodles at midnight. In short, we did what girls do.

And we peed whenever we wanted. Mary's parents didn't care.

When I think back on that night and others like it, I realize the effort my dad made to shout at us - whether it was Mary, my brother, my sisters or I - surely exceeded the disruption he'd suffered if only we'd been allowed to go unchecked.

But this was part of his lifelong curmudgeonly behavior.

Then again, maybe this was Dad's way of having fun. Maybe he had all of us fooled and on those nights, in the darkness of his room, he lay smiling. Maybe, minute by minute, this was the way my dad got in those couple days of fun in his life.