Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there!
Without the influence of my father, I would not be the man I am today. He taught me to hate the French. He taught me how to fire a gun (though I learned not to cross your thumbs when firing a Glock on my own). He showed me what hard work is so I knew without a doubt that I am lazy. He caused me to have my sense of humor by teasing me as a child to the point of near insanity:
“Dad, I’m hungry.”
“Nice to meet you, Hungry.”
He’s always had old-fashioned values. Back in the day, he dodged the draft by signing up to go to Vietnam. He always told my brother and me, “Remember: You can’t wear an earring if you don’t have ears.” He’s always voted straight Republican, except for that one time he voted for Toricelli for Senate since he thought the ads of his Republican opponent, Dick Zimmer, were too scummy. Mom was very angry when she found out, though.
Still, he often played the role of the permissive parent. Though mom didn’t like lots of candy in the house, he always kept a secret stash hidden somewhere, and I’m still sorry for the one time I ratted him out. Once mom put a ban on us kids watching Married with Children, and he secretly watched it along with us.
I’ve learned a lot from my dad. Like, when a man gets angry, he doesn’t get all emotional, he just uses passive aggressiveness (“I’m not angry; I just don’t feel like eating now.”). My dad has given me love, support, wisdom, and multiple firearms. Thus, I use the infallibility I have on my own site to declare my dad the best dad ever.
Oh, and he could beat up your dad.
Hoo-rah for ya Pa.
Sounds like a cool guy, especially the part about giving you guns to play with. Could he adopt a 55-year-old red-haired stepchild?
I think my Dad went to the same “Dad Humor School” yours did… though MY Dad always added “And how are all the little Hungrys?”
One of my Dad’s favorites:
“Hey Dad! Do you know what?”
“W-H-A-T”
What a laugh riot! You’re lucky, Frank. My Dad never gave me any guns. When I was little I had to wait for him to leave and play with his guns when he wasn’t home. He had this really cool .45, black with white bone grips. When we were 6 or 7 years old, me and my bro Fritz used to get it out of it’s “hiding place” in the hall closet and play cowboys with it all the time! Ah, those were fun day!
Sound a lot like my dad. He only taught me to shoot a handgun once though. Everything else was a rifle. See, he was on the US Shooting Team. You may not know what they did back in the late 50’s, but they spent their time touring Western Europe, occaisionally “visiting” Eastern Europe to ‘meet’ with “Rads”. He always came home from the ‘meetings’. (See, a “Rad” to him is short for “Comrad”. Kinda like the slang terms used for the opponents in WWII, Korean, and Vietnam wars. So, my dad didn’t just hate Commies. About the best description he provided went like this:
“When my team couldn’t get close enough to our objective to the handle the situation personally, I handled it from a distance. A long distance.” So I don’t have much use for handguns. But my dad is real proud of my grouping of the rounds inside the ‘V’. And he taught me that, so I’m proud of him.
“Pull My Finger”
Cool dad. Sounds like he just might be the second best dad out there!
me: “I hate gym class. Gym sucks!”
dad: “Jim’s a good guy, he’s just misunderstood.”
This is something my brother wrote last year. Our dad passed away a in January of this year.
Wednesday, September 11, 2002 :::
Last week Michael Medved wrote a column for USA Today on the danger of glamorizing tattoos, using as an example the non-tattooed Vin Diesel’s character from Triple-X. He has a point. Tattoos are even more permanent than an addiction to nicotine; if we think it’s harmful to entice young people with little judgment to become addicted, it’s just as bad to entice them to inject ink under their skin, or to pierce their flesh with sharp objects.
Medved writes “It’s difficult to explain the surging popularity of such trendy torture. Most generations try to shock their elders with some aspect of their grooming, but zoot suits can be easily shed, blue hair can be cut (or falls out), while tattoos and piercings carry the impact of youthful foolishness all the way into old age.”
I have some experience with both tattoos and piercing. You might want to get a beer for this, it’s a good beer story.
In 1975 I was 17, with long hair and shattered fingernails from playing lead guitar badly. It was a strange time, there was a serious but formless threat from the USSR, the Viet Nam war had just come to it’s real end with the fall of Saigon. My father was an iconic American suburbanite. A building contractor of good reputation in our southern California town, he was still reeling from the Summer of Love, the oil embargo and Watergate.
As a 17 year old full of testosterone and attitude, I had a rebellious impulse that was relatively well restrained. My more destructive impulses were channeled into a 64 GTO convertible, and raising money for that gas-gulping, head whipping beast took most of my spare time. I earned minimum wage at the local Jack in the Box, with the bonus of all the stale fries, onion rings and Pepsi I could hold down.
Though he didn’t like my long hair, my dad comforted himself with the memory of my older brother. Greg had hair down to the middle of his back in college. When he got out of grad school he cut it and became the splitting image of Dick Sargent from “Bewitched.” Dad figured that hair was as changeable as shoes. He kept his cut to about a half inch long, so it never needed combing.
As my 18th birthday approached I had an overwhelming urge to do something Rebellious. It’s strange, I know what I did, and I know that at the time it seemed like the right thing to do. But looking back on the idiot teenager I was, I can’t imagine what the impulse was to make me do such a thing.
I got my ear pierced.
That night I came home with an extravagant, pirate-sized hoop earring in my left ear. I washed up, changed into nice trousers and a crisp button down shirt and came to dinner as if nothing was different. I sat to my father’s right, there was no way he could miss it.
I was amazed that he kept it in as long as he did. Through the salad he was a stone, silent and only glancing at my ear. My sister and I were clearing the table when he started to boil. Frowning, he’d rub his forehead, snort, scratch his cheekbone, shift in his chair, and start the cycle again. Finally he couldn’t keep it in anymore. He not-quite-shouted “In my day we didn’t wear women’s jewelry…”
I quietly cut him off. “Please roll up your sleeve.”
He looked at me as if I were speaking Bantu. “What?”
“Your left sleeve. Please roll it up.”
It took 3 or 4 polite repetitions until he did, his eyebrows contorted in a disbelieving pretzel. On his left forearm was a 4” tattoo of a Hula girl. Dad had never said much about it, just that he’d gotten it in Pearl Harbor when he was young and stupid, before they went off to fight the Japanese. Below it were several pairs of capital letters.
“This is my Hula girl” I said. Then I reached up to my left ear with both hands and removed the hoop. “But I can take mine out.”
Dad sat silently for several breaths. Then he cracked. The corners of his mouth turned up and a whistling laugh came out his nose as he ran out of air. He took a fraction of a breath and laughed louder. He never made a real sound but soon we were all joined in joyous self-deflation. It went on and on, till the ice-cream that mom scooped out started to melt. Peace was restored, suburban tranquility reigned.
A week later my dad came to Jack in the Box. 10 , just at closing. He handed me a jewelry box. Inside was a 14 carrot gold earring. In the shape of a Hula girl.
I put it in that night. I won’t say I’ve worn it ever since. But I often do. My wife got me a diamond stud, and a plain gold disk for work. If it weren’t for that Hula girl I would have let the hole heal up 20 years ago. About 10 years ago I rose high enough in the company that suggestions started to be made that I shouldn’t wear an earring at work, then the Soviet Union collapsed and Clinton was elected and nobody cared.
Early this year my son, back from his freshman year at college, decided to embark on an oral history project. He started with me and my wife, then moved on to her parents and mine. After he interviewed my dad he came to talk to me. He sat me down and played me some of the CD he’d burned with my Dad’s life story.
My dad had told him things that I’d never known. About his childhood in Laurel, Mississippi. About his father teaching Signal Corps pilots for the first war. About spending all day getting over the Sepulveda Pass into the wilderness of the San Fernando Valley.
Then he talked about the war.
He’d never talked about what he’d done in the war. We knew he was a Marine, and we knew he’d seen action in the Pacific and had been discharged with a couple of million other men at the end of the war, a few months before he met my mom.
There’s a lot of detail that I won’t go into but the important thing is this. When he was in Pearl Harbor, on his way to fight on a tiny, worthless island he’d never heard of, he and the rest of his squad got matching Hula girl tattoos. A few weeks later they landed at Iwo Jima. He was the only one that survived the day. The letters below the Hula Girl were added after the war. They’re the initials of the other men in his squad.
My son goes back to college this week. He’s got a brand new tattoo on his left forearm. It’s a Hula girl, with the same initials below. But they’re a little smaller than dad’s, and there are three new letters at the end. WTC.
I didn’t laugh when he showed me. I hugged him, and held back the tears. My dad never told me how much that damned Hula girl meant to him, but my son did.
psssst Bill Wittle’s posting under a new nick.
Maybe your dad could beat up my dad, maybe not. My dad walks with a cane, and man! does that thing smart!