Belated Father's Day

When I got back from my three-months-long vacation with my parents, right before Father's Day, my thoughts were none too charitable toward either of them. Thirty-three uninterrupted days with my parents, the last ten days of which were spent in the car on a road trip. Thus, for my card to my father (which is all he got from me seeing as I don't have a job and am trying to start up a company), I borrowed sentiments from someecards.com. Something to the effect of "Sorry I can only afford the same Father's Day gift I got you when I was seven, but I'd be honored to buy you a celebratory meal with the credit card you pay for."

On previous Father's Days I've been sentimental, and this has been brushed off. None of our immediate family is too comfortable with emotional expression. So I didn't feel too bad about my lighthearted card. But this past Sunday I learned that a couple of guys I went to school with, brothers, had lost their dad in an accident during a trip to celebrate one of the brothers getting into med school. This is the fifth dead father of school friends--that I know of! And I don't think we're at the age that our fathers should be dying. They're not even retired yet!

Ever since this terrible news, I've been inundated with a feeling of gratefulness. I'm so grateful my dad is alive. But even more than that, I'm grateful that he's such a good dad.

When I was little, it was taken for granted that all dad's were tall, good at sports, and smart. I even thought that my dad might be a little worse than other dads because he had a terrible temper. The number of times I can remember that temper being untempered, though, is less than mine ten fingers. In fact, whenever me and my two brothers really pissed him off by being too annoying or wrestling too much in the car, he would give us the option: "Do you want me to pull over now and spank you on the side of the road, or wait till we get home?" We of course always opted for when we got home because a) he wouldn't be pissed anymore, so the spanking wouldn't be as hard, b) who wants to be beaten on the side of the road--embarrassing, and c) most of the time he would forget!

Although, the older I get, the less I think the forgetting theory is likely. He probably just didn't want to beat us once we were behaving for once. Who wants to listen to wailing children? And boy, did I holler whenever I was in trouble. All he had to do was look at my crosswise and I'd begin welling up, sobs backing up at the bottom of my throat. One false move by him and they'd be released. More of a punishment on him and anyone in my vicinity than on me, really.

The older I get, the more women I know who had poor relationships with the fathers. My dad was great in many ways; some I have, I'm sure, unfortunately forgotten. The things that stand out clearest to me now are those things that are so dramatically different from what other women have experienced with their fathers.  

One of my friends had a father who assigned all women to one of four categories: beautiful, pretty, cute, ugly. He would tell my friend, his daughter, she wasn't beautiful or pretty, but she was cute. It made sense that she would have a dysfunctional relationship with her body image. 


My father always complimented me and my mother, and it never made me feel that beauty was something to be sought after nor was it a competition I was in. By no means am I the most beautiful or the most attractive woman. My dad's compliments didn't make me vain or preoccupied with my image. Every woman has her own innate beauty, and I am confident in mine because of my father's attention. And he still compliments me. I painted my fingernails and toenails hot pink on Sunday. At lunch when we held hands for prayer, he said, "Oh! That's a pretty color. What's it called?" And I replied around a mouthful of food, "Pwinksh." (The sh sound is the sound of me sucking spit back into my pretty mouth. I'm sure he's as proud of me and I am of him.) Not only did he notice a change in my appearance, but he complimented the change and asked for information about it. Which I didn't know because I really can't be bothered with details. But it made my day.

Another friend of mine has a father that "tells her like it is," often remarking, "Stop being such a bitch." And she says she likes, even needs, that sort of straightforward talk in her life. My father, I'm sure, has had to have had the passing impression that I'm acting like a b****. And that's probably a kind thought. My teenage years were not pretty, ya'll. But he has never, ever, ever called me that. Nor would he! You do not call the people you love degrading names. Instead, he instructs me (most patiently considering my headstrong behavior) how to be a lady and a godly woman. I am almost never grateful for this instruction, but when compared to the alternative, I think I'll change my tune. And because of his respectful way of talking to me and my mother, I've never sought a verbally abusive boyfriend or had those acidic thoughts about myself. I might be awful or mean, but I never view myself in subhuman terms.

Play time. I rarely hear my friends talk about playing with their fathers. My dad played with us. We would wrestle. We would swim. He would make up stories about Walter and Penelope (although that was more of a way to get us to go to sleep instead of staying up till all hours chasing each other with squeals of addled excitement). He coached us in sports (though those good memories are mixed with uh...other memories, pretty evenly). And I have a couple of very fond warm rain memories.

Oklahoma gets warm rain. Sometimes the sun is even out when it rains. Warm rain requires the temperature to be 75F or warmer, and the rain is about air temperature. The benefit of warm rain is that it is excellent singing in the rain weather. But that's not what we did with our dad. One morning, when we were all still very small, he piled us into one of my brothers' wagon and pulled us all around the neighborhood in our pajamas. It was a very small parade, but the memory of getting pulled around in the rain by our zany father remains one of my fondest.

The other warm rain memory began too early on a Saturday. There were thunderstorms, and Father pulled us out of bed before we ready, before we'd even had breakfast, and instructed us to put on grubby clothes. We were going to dig trenches. This, dear readers, probably doesn't sound like much fun to you. Nor to us! Oh the bellyaching that met my father's ears as he tried to roust us from our warm roosts. Once outside, the digging began. But we had to use our hands. And there wasn't any apparent system to Father's trench scheme. The need for the trenches was also beyond our ken. The backyard wasn't flooded, had never flooded, so why did it need trenches? I don't know who threw the first mud ball. I have my suspicions that he stood a head taller than the rest of us and had a better arm.

After a couple hours, we resembled the Swamp Monster more than children. Mom made us bathe outside with the water hose--which was quite a bit colder than the rain--before coming inside. This, of course, led to a water fight, with our father having control of the only weapon the majority of the time. After seeing what little progress we made, she demanded we disrobe outside and  provided us with towels to hide under as we ran, giggling, to our rooms to properly bathe and put on normal clothes.

I love the memories I have of my dad, and I appreciate the way he parented me then and now. Sometimes I'm misunderstood, but I'm always loved. Sometimes I'm hurt, but he always asks forgiveness. Sometimes I'm angry, but he's always willing to explain. No one is perfect. But my dad is the perfect father for me.

Share some of your childhood memories below or discuss how you feel about your dad.

*P.S. Next month I will post some fictional writing I've been working on. Be sure to come back and let me know your thoughts!

Teddy, Nick Cage, and Shrimp

"By acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid." --Theodore Roosevelt 


For the last year I've been stretching my boundaries. I made the resolution to be adventurous. This was explored in many areas of my life: work, hobbies, friends, food, activities, social situations, etc. Instead of feeling trepidation, seeing only the awkwardness in any new situation, I vowed to pretend as if I was not afraid. You own twenty cats and always smell a little like urine? Sure! I'll try your brownies. A party that neither you nor I was invited to? Let's do it. That's what the most interesting man in the world would do, right? Oh? It isn't a party after all? Just an intimate affair. Well, I'm not an introverted weirdo. I'm sure this will end with me making friends or something...

After nearly a year of this, I propose that getting out of your comfort zone and experiencing adventure are not the same thing. In fact, they rarely overlap. It's also nigh impossible to find adventure. Adventure or, as most oft occurs to me, misadventure finds you. As will be illustrated in stories of things that have actually happened to me.

A picky eater at birth, I've challenged myself to try new foods and be open. No palatable epiphanies of yet. But I was going on a trip to new countries. Surely if I was going to have a victuals inspiration, it was going to be abroad.

When vacationing in Italy, we went out for pizza. We were greeted by hearty buono seras and ushered to a red check bedecked table. It was all very genuine, and the menu was filled with a variety of meats: salami, prosciutto (raw and cooked), sausage, and marine beasties of all sorts. Well, I was in Italy, was I not? A peninsula rumored to have wonderful seafood. I had not yet had seafood during the trip. True, I don't particularly enjoy seafood, but this was a TripAdvisor-endorsed restaurant and I was on an adventure. As my family members ordered their safe combinations--the 4 formaggio for my parents and the salami for my brothers--I smugly congratulated myself for taking a risk. They were all going to want a piece of my shrimp pizza and rue the day the stayed in their comfort zones.

Except the pizza smelled like it had been dipped into a polluted harbor. And the shrimp tasted exactly as they smelled.

One might be tempted to say, "Well, but you had an experience!" or something to that effect. We experience things constantly; why should we experience uncomfortable things that don't actually enrich our lives? This is not an adventure or even misadventure. Just another epicurean fail. The only thing gleaned from the "experience" is perhaps that one should not eat shrimp that were not harvested from the Gulf of Mexico. My palate was not expanded, my eyes not opened, nor my horizons broadened.

This is one of many stories I can tell about being purposefully adventuresome not working. At all. But non-adventures are boring. So lets talk about real adventure! Or, again, misadventure, as the case will probably be.

My closest friend in thought and behavior lives in Tulsa. I visit her as often as possible, and nothing is ever normal. This is probably because two weirdos weeble-wobbling all over Tulsa, which is no stranger to weird, will naturally attract a certain kind of attention and interaction. We never say to ourselves, "Let's go do X. It will be an adventure!" Both of us are quite a bit more comfortable reading or imagining adventure. Even acting it out with one another. We once had a full-fledged soap opera with the guy who lived across the street from her with his mother. We named him Steve and never once spoke to him in real life. But we had quite the sordid triangle going with me vying for his affections while his out-of-town girlfriend was...out of town. But all my imaginary book donating, leftover sandwich giving, and pants offering was for naught. A few weeks later he packed up his pirate's treasure chest, lashed it to the top of his Kia, and headed for parts unknown. Probably that skank in Vermont. Whom I also never met.

But real life adventure finds us nonetheless. On a trip to New Orleans, we of course scheduled a ghost tour. Stop after stop on our tour was disappointing. The squatty tourguidess regaled us with facts about old buildings, disproved ghost stories, and described pictures that reflected the glare of souls. Or lens flares as they are known by professional photographers. The high point of the tour was when she stopped in front of a gray stone mansion.

"This is Nicholas Cage's house."

She paused significantly, peering up at the group. It was as if she was surprised we weren't running to kiss the stones or swooning at the proximity of such a screen god. As the awkward pause lengthened she gathered herself, round shoulders heaving upward to add height to her toadstool frame.

"As you may have heard, he is in financial difficulties. Lost millions. He'll lose the house. Of course, the house was the problem to begin with. If he had come to me, I could have told him it was haunted, bad luck. Don't buy the house, I would have said. But he didn't, and now he's losing millions. Speaking of Hollywood, did you know Angelina and Brad have a house here? Oh no it isn't haunted. They love New Orleans. Treated like one of the locals."

And so we talked about Brangelina for twenty minutes till we hit our next stop. A school house.

"Isn't this beautiful?"

Her short arm lifted to display a classic French Quarter brick building. It was pretty, and it had nothing to do with Brad and Ange. We all nodded appreciatively, encouraging her toward this new topic. Some even ooooohed in response, remembering the awkward pause at Nick's house.

Her smile fell in sync with her arm. "Well it wasn't built for you."

You could hear the collective intake of breath. Now she had our attention.

"The French Quarter has people who live here and make a living here. Don't throw trash where we make our livelihoods. This isn't Disney World. That concludes the tour. Remember, us in the hospitality industry survive on tips. Thank you in advance for your generosity."

She had snookered us! The ole lead with a question and then thrash you with righteous indignation when you answer positively. We didn't stick around to see if anyone tipped her; just sauntered off, hands in pockets, whistling softly. But I would garner a guess that she doesn't make very much in tips.

That is adventure. It is the unexpected. That's why it can't be sought. But when you're in the midst of it, you can make the decision to stick through it and pretend as if you're not uncomfortable, committing to the unfolding of events; or you can drop out, as many in that abysmal tour did, and miss out on memories and one of my favorite verbal tricks to play on people.

You like this blog? Well I didn't write it for you!