Tales from the Dad Side (5 page)

As I waited for Peter's heat, I thought back to my own childhood victory stolen because of my father's kindness. But this was New Jersey, where they don't allow random acts of kindness—they're stopped at the Pennsylvania state line.

“Peter, let me see your car.”

I eyeballed the immediate vicinity and, seeing we were alone, knew that I could slather our wheels in graphite and not have to share it with any of the other racers under any circumstances. So I started.

“Hey, Peter!” one of my son's den mates shouted halfway across the room as he lunged our way. “What's that stuff?”

Déjà vu all over again.

“Just a little Jiffy Lube,” I said. “And it looks like we just ran out.” Liar, liar, Dad's pants on fire.

“Mr. Doocy, my father says that graphite doesn't work as well as this,” he said, pulling out a platinum tube of Extreme Graphite/Moly Dry Lubricant. “Do you want to try some?”

It was tempting. That kid was holding in his hand the Excalibur-grade material that you could only get online from Mexico, which is of course the world leader in dry lubricant.

“We're okay.” And we were. We had a lot of fun doing the project together, despite that single loud word shouted when, pre-race, Peter dropped his car in the parking lot and his front right wheel broke off and rolled under our SUV. That was probably why the car finished dead last, a family tradition.

While we never won a trophy for a race car, Peter did win three consecutive blue ribbons for pumpkin carving. What can I say, we're half Gypsy and we're good with knives. He also received an award for salesmanship (we bought his entire stock), and once again to illustrate how times had changed, his award was a wooden plaque with an arrow on top, but there was no tip on the arrow so nobody would poke out an eye.

“Nobody gets an authentic, dangerous award until you sign a waiver.”

While a lot had changed since I wore the neckerchief, the changes to scouting were probably a good thing, including the woman thing. The older I get, the more I realize that I should cut the cord to the past and embrace change. If Rick James could go from “Super Freak” to Old Navy, I should be able to switch from three-ways to extreme graphite dry lubricant.

Fatherhood Is Hard—Get a Helmet

L
ate one afternoon Grandma and I were watching a soap opera called
The Secret Storm,
which seemed to be the dumbest name in the history of television because there was never a storm of any kind, no tornadoes, no hurricanes, no deadly wind chill, nothing. But Grandma Sharp liked it and she was our afternoon caretaker when my mom was working, so I'd sit and watch with her in the highly unlikely event that a vicious squall swept through and savaged everybody including that off-camera organist who had a habit of waking up and going to work just ten seconds before a commercial.

The word
Grandma
was hard for me to enunciate, and for a while it came out “Gunga,” which became a lifelong nickname that stuck. Gunga was a full-blooded Swede, who worked odd nights as a short-order cook. She also had a great racket on the side: her friends at the federal government sent her something called Social Security—it was money simply for being old. She was my only blood relative who'd give us candy immediately before and after meals, and on birthdays and Christmas she'd open her seemingly bottomless purse to buy us the presents my parents refused, the ones with sharp edges or small swallowable parts, or that were simply dangerous.

“Look, it's a real gun
with a bayonet
!” I squealed on my fifth birthday, wondering where Gunga got it. Apparently she had met a guy at the diner who got her a deal on it despite the serial numbers be
ing filed off, and I was able to keep it in my possession for almost a minute.

“Stephen James!” my mother snapped. “Put that gun back in the box! And Mother, please don't arm my children. They'll have guns when they're drafted.” Another reason to hurry up and turn eighteen—I'd have army clothes and guns.

It was always midway through
The Secret Storm
that my mom appeared at the front door after work, and on that day she dropped a carton of Camels on the table and said, “Let's go, kids!”

My oldest sister, Cathy, was almost two and a wobbly walker, so I grabbed her hand and guided her off the porch, around the front of the car, and over to the passenger side, where I pulled open the big Ford's icebox-sized door. We always rode in what at that time was considered the safest spot of the vehicle, on the front seat; that way, in the event of an accident, my sister and I would be shot projectile style out the windshield like a couple of blond mortars.

Mom saw we were safely beside her so she put it in reverse, stared in the side rearview, and started to back down the driveway. Grandma materialized at the door and waved good-bye. “See you tomorrow.”

“Okay, bye!” I yelled.

Cathy had been with Grandma less than thirty seconds earlier, but hearing Gunga's voice she made a typical two-year-old's snap decision that she'd rather stay there than go to our house and watch Mommy cook. The concept of MOVING CAR + SMALL CHILD = DANGER was beyond her years, and when she pulled up on the door lever it opened and she promptly fell out of the car. My mother, who was looking over her left shoulder away from us, missed it. But we both felt the front of the car bounce a little.

“JoAnne!” Grandma screamed in a bloody-murder voice I'd never heard on earth before and haven't since.

My mother turned around only when Gunga screamed. She immediately knew something bad had happened.

“Where's your sister?”

“She fell out, that way.” I pointed toward the door.

“Oh my goodness!” Out she leaped, leaving me alone where I couldn't see a thing, until my mother appeared at the back passenger door with my screaming sister in her arms. “Mother, you drive.” And Grandma got behind the wheel. We had never driven that fast through downtown as we headed south down the main drag toward the hospital. I rode up front, hugging the seat and looking back at my sister. I was the only one with no tears in his eyes.

“She'll be fine, Stephen, don't worry.”

I wasn't worried at all, because this was nothing new. My sister was always falling down and then crying, although I couldn't understand why this time we were going to the hospital. As we pulled in, Gunga laid on the horn and somebody from the emergency room ran out with a gurney and they carted off my sister with Mom alongside as Grandma parked the car and we sat vigil in the waiting room.

Since I was a kid, nobody told me anything, so Grandma and I just sat in the waiting room, waiting. It was my first real hospital visit and nothing like
Medical Center
with Chad Everett, where doctors were urgently barking out orders to “Give them ten cc's,
STAT
!” as nurses set up IVs for somebody with a rare but untreatable disease that would somehow be cured one minute before an exciting preview of next week's episode. In real life there was no dashing, no running, just a whole lot of sitting and waiting with Grandma next to the pay phone as she chain-smoked Camels. The waiting-room TV was not tuned to the channel Gunga and I normally watched, so the shows that were playing were unfamiliar to me. We watched Merv Griffin and his distinguished sidekick, a slender and sophisticated man who sounded like he needed more fiber in his diet.

“Is that the king of England?” I asked her, pointing at Arthur Treacher.

“Looks like Orville Bebbemeyer from over in Brit,” she said, reducing the Edwardian actor to a small-town hoaxer who'd affected a phony accent to one day franchise fried fish to a nation.

Grandma had been trying to locate my father all afternoon, but with no cell phone or answering machine, every fifteen minutes she'd
walk over to the pay phone, dial our number, and wait for my father to answer, which he finally did around seven thirty that night.

“We're at the hospital—JoAnne ran over Cathy. Come quick.”

That was the first time I heard officially that my mother ran over my sister. Within ten minutes my dad appeared at the double automatic door, and I remember a feeling of relief that now everything would be okay.

“The tire went right over her belly,” Grandma told him, “and the doctor said because her bones are still so rubbery, nothing got broken. JoAnne's still in there with her.”

“I could use a cigarette,” Dad said as he turned to a passing physician from whom he bummed a Lucky Strike. He smoked it next to the nurses' station, where there were plenty of ashtrays right under an advisory from the surgeon general that cigarette smoking could lead to burning down your house. Why was the whole country worried about harmless smoke, I wondered, when the real danger to America was children falling out of cars only to be run over by their parents?

Miraculously, my sister had no internal bleeding and was going to be fine. Very late that night my mom told my dad to take me home. For the first time in my life, it was just the two of us alone in the house, sitting at the kitchen table as he drank one cup of coffee after another. I remember the pin-drop quiet framed something he said that was so remarkable to my five-year-old mind that I've never forgotten.

“Stephen, I wish I could trade places with your sister.”

To me, that was just plain weird—why would my dad want to fall out of the car and have Mom run over him? Then we'd have two in the hospital, and with Mom sitting vigil, who would make my breakfast? I just nodded, and hoped his crazy idea did not come to pass.

Two days later my sister celebrated her birthday in the pediatric wing, where the staff threw her a party with chocolate cake and rubber gloves inflated balloon style. After many hugs and kisses, and a ride in a real wheelchair, Cathy was dismissed, and considering what
had happened to her in the previous four days, she was lucky to be alive. But I wasn't thinking about my sister. I was fixating on the wheelchair ride and blown-up-glove balloons. I made a mental note to make sure my appendix burst mid-October so I too could have a bedpan birthday.

“Let's go!” my father said as he helped my mom and sister into the car. “JoAnne, I'm driving so nobody gets run over on the way home,” he cracked, which got an audible gasp from Gunga and a dirty look from my mom, who surely felt guilty. Now I wonder if my father felt responsible that he wasn't at home the day it happened. He went through a period as a helicopter parent, hovering over us all the time, but eventually we broke free from him and resumed pulling boneheaded stunts that were at the danger level of the stupid chart.

When my own children came along, I thought about what my father had said, about how he would have traded places with one of his kids so she wouldn't have to suffer. It was a gallant and admirable suggestion, but I just didn't feel the same way. Maybe it was because all of my children's maladies were so pedestrian—why would I want to trade places with a kid with the croup?

Our children Mary and Peter did something that freaked us out in their first few months—their eyes would float around every which way. Thankfully, they grew out of it. At four months Sally's eyes were still randomly drifting around to the point that sometimes when you looked at her eye all you could see was white because her blue iris had rolled out of sight. She did not outgrow it, so my worried wife took her to a series of experts whose early treatment was to build up her eye muscles by putting a patch over her best eye.

“What's with the little pirate?” an older man who stopped at our garage sale said.

Not funny to us. We just icily stared at him as he bought an eight-year-old Sony Betamax for ten dollars. Had he not made the pirate crack I would have told him the only thing that worked on the Sony was the clock.

The eye patches didn't work, and before she was a year old Sally
was already wearing glasses, which would stay on the bridge of her nose between five and nine seconds before she'd paw them off. To train her to keep her glasses on, they had my wife put Sally's hands in mittens, which got odd glares from strangers in mid-July when she was wearing them at the mall. She had a bright red pair, which when worn with her glasses and eye patch would have prompted the guy at the garage sale to ask, “What's with the lobster pirate?”

She could not see well, and as her vision deteriorated, her parents were constantly tormenting her with patches and mittens and glasses and burning eyedrops that blurred her sight so badly she'd crawl blindly every which way until she'd run into a wall headfirst. Sally had a truly pitiful start to life. One night before bed, I was giving her a bath and as I rinsed her hair I noticed a lump behind her left ear. I called in my wife, who'd never noticed it either. The next day we were blown away when we were told Sally would need brain surgery just when her eye doctor said she needed her eyes operated upon as well. Before her second birthday she would have two operations; curiously, she was at exactly the same age as my sister when she fell out of the car.

“I'll bring you back to recovery as soon as she's out,” the nurse said, prying Sally from my arms. The child had sensed that this was no ordinary trip to the doctor, and alerted the entire first floor of the Fairfax County Hospital that she did not want whatever was waiting for her behind door number one.

Kidnappings are quieter. Every head turned our way, but nobody gave us the
shut up your kid
look, because they all recognized
that cry,
and at that moment not a soul wanted to be in our shoes. The sobbing was as loud and heartbreaking as I'd ever heard. Tears were streaming down my wife's face as the nurse carried the squirming Sally out of the waiting room through the automatic doors. We sat there stunned because our littlest, most vulnerable one had just been pried away by a total stranger and taken somewhere very bright and scary. In fact, we knew exactly where she'd been taken, because even though she was somewhere in a pre-op room three or four closed
doors away from us, we could still hear her screaming. It was a wretched wail that went on for an agonizing ten minutes.

“That's not good,” Kathy said as it abruptly got louder. We turned toward the operating-room door, and our nurse was speed-walking in our direction.

“We need a pacifier,” she said sternly. “And a bottle. She's quite disruptive.”

I was surprised a state-of-the-art medical facility didn't have standby generic pacifiers at the ready. Kathy dug the requested items out of the diaper bag, and ninety seconds later Sally was quiet. Relieved, we sat there scared out of our wits: what were they doing to our baby in the operating room? It was then that I had my first conversation as a parent with the Almighty. As a kid I'd had many urgent one-way chats, generally along the lines of “Now I lay me down to rest, I hope I pass tomorrow's test. If I should die before I wake, that's one less math test I have to take.”

God never let me down. But this was different. I wasn't praying for myself; it was somebody else who needed some help. I was new at asking for third-party miracles, so I kept it simple. Because it was an off-the-record prayer just between me and Him, I'd like to keep it private, but it was exactly what you would expect from a father whose child was on an operating table.

Of course we are an instant-gratification society, and when we ask for things, we want an immediate return phone call, so I waited for a sign that He was on the case. There was no deep James Earl Jones voice that told me to relax, nor a friendly apparition on the waiting-room TV that I could imagine was directed at me, or even a pronouncement that I should go and build a baseball diamond in our cornfield; instead, I felt an unnatural calmness because I knew she had the best doctors in the world and it was now in God's big hands.

“Doocy family,” the nurse barked out, walking through the automatic door. “Everything went well. She's fine.” That was our cue to start breathing again. Outfitted in hospital scrubs, we were led to a blindingly bright recovery room, where Sally was breathing heavily
as she lay there hooked up to an IV and heart monitor in a cheerless little crib. It wasn't like her bed at home, no stuffed animals or mobile, no brightly colored sheets and matching bumpers—everything was simple and white. It was like a layout from Pottery Barn's hospital collection.