Dad Stories

Like most men (boys?) of my generation, my dad is an icon to me. His academic, political and social contributions set a high bar for me to attain the american dream of surpasing the prosperity of the previous familial generation. Despite all his great achievements though, I must confess nothing gives me greater pleasure than giving him a hard time. Being the 7th of 8 children, my dad is a bit older (respective to me) than most of my friends parents. In this context, from time to time he will really "miss the boat" in his ability to communicate or empathize with someone my age. To no end, my younger brother and I are amused by this. That being said, I wanted to record a couple of my favorites in this category.

Second runner up: when my dad didn't understand why I didn't want my brother to stay with Carrie and I on our wedding night. Eventually, he gave in under the badgering by me, my brother, my step mother, and most of the rest of the family but I'm not sure he ever got it.

First runner up: The time he gave my brother and I a nickel to go buy a nerf football. A nickel. That's 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 Argentinean pesos to you and me.

Favorite of all time: When I was a sophomore in high school, he decided I was staying up too late, and that he needed to re-institute a bedtime for me during the week. Not entirely unreasonable I guess. Unless...his initial suggestion was...wait for it...8:30 PM. For those of you south of Nome, it’s still light out in June at 8:30. When I protested (in between bellows of laughter), his follow up suggestion (after insisting he thought this time reasonable) was that he "anonymously" poll ten of my classmates as to what their bedtimes were. Given that I went to a school that had 67 people in my graduating class, and that it was an all boys school, there would be nothing anonymous about it, and something like that is basically a lifetime prescription for an atomic wedgie.