I would like to dedicate today's post to my dad, who passed away 25 years ago today. He was the kind of dad every kid should have, like Danny's in The Champion of the World. And I was the lucky one born to him in enough time to have a few memories to be able to share here.
I'd like to skip telling you about how successful or intelligent he was, which is what most people always bring up, and get right to what counted for me: my dad was just a lovely person. He would pretend to be surprised when I jumped out at him from the same spot every single night, when he came home from the hospital; yet when I hid in front of the mirror one time, he pointed out why it was a bad hiding place. He was equally as interested in discussing the latest findings with his Nobel-prize level research scientist friends over supper, as discussing the latest models with the owner of his favorite used car dealership, in the lot outside in the blazing Texas heat. He signed both my progress reports and the autograph book (with disguised handwriting) that I put out for the Easter Bunny. He treated our cats like they were eccentric but respectable beings; he quit hunting one day when he sighted a deer and it looked straight back through its eyelashes. He wept a rare time, although not in front of me, when our 10-year-old cat died of a preventable illness. I only ever saw him really angry a few times in my life, when I was in real or imagined danger -- when I came back from day camp with a terrible sunburn, tapped on our car window with a screwdriver, or almost got crushed in an airport crowd.
He might have been on 24-hour-emergency beeper alert, but he never rushed things. He made the time to play board games with me, like I was an equal (so it was especially memorable when I beat him at Memory only one time, on my birthday). He accepted that my doll was my daughter, and therefore invited to the comfortable chair for our weekly nature/science TV show viewings (although she was usually replaced by my very own cat, about getting whom 'next year' he had kept his word). He rode the train at the park with me, and uncomplainingly let me apply (to him) my mother's green and black makeup. He was patient with impatient me and my friends, and explained to me that my meanest classmates were probably just jealous. When my mom and I were overseas, he wrote us separate letters, even though I could barely read cursive.
He read stories to me and did the voices. He sang me an Irish lullaby (probably passed down from his grandma) with the proper accent. He never told me about laying railroad tracks as a teenager, or leading his group at youth camp; but he did tell me that the grandmother I never knew had advised him to marry a girl not for her brains, but for her heart (I guess she just turned out to have both). He taught me both Latin phrases and horrible pig Latin puns; he helped me set up a booby trap for the tooth fairy, and then made up a story to explain why this time she had left my tooth under my pillow and the coins in another room. He told me that girls were just as smart as boys, explaining that even medically there was no difference in the brains of people of different sexes or races, and that people who so discriminated were very unfortunately mistaken.
My dad treated his patients as not cases, but people. He created a special frame for a little girl who was never supposed to be able to walk -- he went down to the racetrack to help a runner fix his stride. He introduced me to them in the hospital and them to me in his private practice. One of my earliest memories is of him setting my ankle in a cast, after I broke it leaping off a chair to imitate a man on TV, while he explained to me again how x-rays worked and so would be painless. He never told me that he barely made it through the first and most boring year of medical school by going to the nearby symphony orchestra, but he taught me to recognize the main classical composers when they came on the car radio.
He let me hijack his xerox machine to create my own photocopied books, and finish off his share of toffee from the office refrigerator. He refused to let me eat chemical-laden desserts like twinkies, or anything with saccharin, but let me taste his hospital coffee, or buy chocolate cereal as a special treat. Besides the hospital, the used car lot, school, the grocery store, and the park, he took me to gym classes and play dates, and to the circus, the musical Annie, Romeo and Juliet, the movies, and the ballet (and still tolerated me breaking out my tutu costume to dance to the 'Ghostbusters' theme for the umpteenth time). He made me fasten my seatbelt, take my vitamins, wash my hands, soak my splinters, and clean up my own messes and spills (which he then pitched in to help if they were too big).
He gamely stomped on the plastic spider I put down to try to distract him from killing the real ones; he didn't laugh when I accidentally killed an earthworm while chopping it in half to make two, or buried a moth, properly embalmed as I'd just learnt about, next to our cat. He helped me rescue an orphaned baby bird and try to keep it alive, and even suffered me to name it 'Odomos' (after the intriguing mosquito repellent). He explained how to tell if the pebbles in the yard were rocks or an Indian arrowheads, how to tell apart the birds, what to do if I saw a fawn, where to look for antlers, how to spot armadillos or roadrunners, and how not to startle the foxes or rabbits; he gave our neighborhood opossum family all nicknames, from Mr. Possum Pinknose on down, and also some of the raccoons. He measured the circle of our hill with his exactly 12-inch-long feet, and then let me walk the mile with him, and didn't shoo away the puppy that tagged along the whole way. He tolerated my friendship with the regularly visiting chihuahua, even though no-one else could stand the yapping, jumping, and nipping; he brought the cats in at night in the winter, even if it meant going out to look for them in the cold.
It wouldn't be fair for me to ignore the rest of his role as a family man, but I'd rather not go into detail on those other relationships here -- enough to say that my mother got breakfast in bed on Mother's Day, was never 'my wife' but 'your momma,' only made their bed on her alternate days, and was entirely supported in her own career.
I could go on, but I think I've said enough to make it clear that although my dad wasn't perfect (or he would have been way too boring), he was the perfect dad for me.
I'd like to skip telling you about how successful or intelligent he was, which is what most people always bring up, and get right to what counted for me: my dad was just a lovely person. He would pretend to be surprised when I jumped out at him from the same spot every single night, when he came home from the hospital; yet when I hid in front of the mirror one time, he pointed out why it was a bad hiding place. He was equally as interested in discussing the latest findings with his Nobel-prize level research scientist friends over supper, as discussing the latest models with the owner of his favorite used car dealership, in the lot outside in the blazing Texas heat. He signed both my progress reports and the autograph book (with disguised handwriting) that I put out for the Easter Bunny. He treated our cats like they were eccentric but respectable beings; he quit hunting one day when he sighted a deer and it looked straight back through its eyelashes. He wept a rare time, although not in front of me, when our 10-year-old cat died of a preventable illness. I only ever saw him really angry a few times in my life, when I was in real or imagined danger -- when I came back from day camp with a terrible sunburn, tapped on our car window with a screwdriver, or almost got crushed in an airport crowd.
He might have been on 24-hour-emergency beeper alert, but he never rushed things. He made the time to play board games with me, like I was an equal (so it was especially memorable when I beat him at Memory only one time, on my birthday). He accepted that my doll was my daughter, and therefore invited to the comfortable chair for our weekly nature/science TV show viewings (although she was usually replaced by my very own cat, about getting whom 'next year' he had kept his word). He rode the train at the park with me, and uncomplainingly let me apply (to him) my mother's green and black makeup. He was patient with impatient me and my friends, and explained to me that my meanest classmates were probably just jealous. When my mom and I were overseas, he wrote us separate letters, even though I could barely read cursive.
He read stories to me and did the voices. He sang me an Irish lullaby (probably passed down from his grandma) with the proper accent. He never told me about laying railroad tracks as a teenager, or leading his group at youth camp; but he did tell me that the grandmother I never knew had advised him to marry a girl not for her brains, but for her heart (I guess she just turned out to have both). He taught me both Latin phrases and horrible pig Latin puns; he helped me set up a booby trap for the tooth fairy, and then made up a story to explain why this time she had left my tooth under my pillow and the coins in another room. He told me that girls were just as smart as boys, explaining that even medically there was no difference in the brains of people of different sexes or races, and that people who so discriminated were very unfortunately mistaken.
My dad treated his patients as not cases, but people. He created a special frame for a little girl who was never supposed to be able to walk -- he went down to the racetrack to help a runner fix his stride. He introduced me to them in the hospital and them to me in his private practice. One of my earliest memories is of him setting my ankle in a cast, after I broke it leaping off a chair to imitate a man on TV, while he explained to me again how x-rays worked and so would be painless. He never told me that he barely made it through the first and most boring year of medical school by going to the nearby symphony orchestra, but he taught me to recognize the main classical composers when they came on the car radio.
He let me hijack his xerox machine to create my own photocopied books, and finish off his share of toffee from the office refrigerator. He refused to let me eat chemical-laden desserts like twinkies, or anything with saccharin, but let me taste his hospital coffee, or buy chocolate cereal as a special treat. Besides the hospital, the used car lot, school, the grocery store, and the park, he took me to gym classes and play dates, and to the circus, the musical Annie, Romeo and Juliet, the movies, and the ballet (and still tolerated me breaking out my tutu costume to dance to the 'Ghostbusters' theme for the umpteenth time). He made me fasten my seatbelt, take my vitamins, wash my hands, soak my splinters, and clean up my own messes and spills (which he then pitched in to help if they were too big).
He gamely stomped on the plastic spider I put down to try to distract him from killing the real ones; he didn't laugh when I accidentally killed an earthworm while chopping it in half to make two, or buried a moth, properly embalmed as I'd just learnt about, next to our cat. He helped me rescue an orphaned baby bird and try to keep it alive, and even suffered me to name it 'Odomos' (after the intriguing mosquito repellent). He explained how to tell if the pebbles in the yard were rocks or an Indian arrowheads, how to tell apart the birds, what to do if I saw a fawn, where to look for antlers, how to spot armadillos or roadrunners, and how not to startle the foxes or rabbits; he gave our neighborhood opossum family all nicknames, from Mr. Possum Pinknose on down, and also some of the raccoons. He measured the circle of our hill with his exactly 12-inch-long feet, and then let me walk the mile with him, and didn't shoo away the puppy that tagged along the whole way. He tolerated my friendship with the regularly visiting chihuahua, even though no-one else could stand the yapping, jumping, and nipping; he brought the cats in at night in the winter, even if it meant going out to look for them in the cold.
It wouldn't be fair for me to ignore the rest of his role as a family man, but I'd rather not go into detail on those other relationships here -- enough to say that my mother got breakfast in bed on Mother's Day, was never 'my wife' but 'your momma,' only made their bed on her alternate days, and was entirely supported in her own career.
I could go on, but I think I've said enough to make it clear that although my dad wasn't perfect (or he would have been way too boring), he was the perfect dad for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment