Tales from the Dad Side (6 page)

We were surprised that her eyes weren't bandaged over, and the doctor explained: “She'd just rip them off, so why bother?” A few quiet minutes after we arrived she started to stir, and when she opened her eyes they were instantly and recognizably straighter. Thank you, God. It was a medical miracle.

Her ten seconds of quiet time abruptly ended when she recognized us as the people who had sent her into the back room where those strangers in surgical masks had done things to her eyes. As she screeched I saw something I'd never witnessed in forty years on this earth. There was blood running down her face. She had
bloody tears
.

She looked like she'd just been punched in the eyes. This was easily the most pitiful thing I'd ever seen. We felt helpless. I held her tight on my lap as my wife caressed her hair. Late in the afternoon Sally's doctor released her, so we took her home, where she crawled over to her brother and sister and put her face next to theirs because she wanted no part of her parents.

At some point in the ordeal I thought back to my father, who'd said he'd change places with my sister who'd been run over, and I wondered, would I do the same? Would I trade places with Sally? My heart said yes, but as I thought of having a highly trained specialist prop my eyelids open with surgical toothpicks and then, using a razor-sharp scalpel, slice into the muscles behind the eyeball to make them an iota longer, I equivocated. Would I trade places with my child if it meant a doctor would poke me in the eye with a knife? The answer was swift and blunt—I would…but I just can't.

I had a really good reason:
because it was impossible.
Hiring a stand-in for surgery didn't make the sick one any better. In reality, all parents can do is hold our kids and stay with them until the pain or the scare goes away. Would I donate a kidney to my kid? Absolutely.

Retina, part of my liver? Yes and yes. If I've got some spare part, it's here for the taking, and that is a pledge that will stand as long as I'm standing.

On the day of Sally's brain operation there was some good news and some bad news. The good news was that the bump behind her ear was an unexplainable growth that had no effect whatsoever on her, so the brain surgeon simply removed it, and then vacuumed clean our insurance company.

“Thank goodness,” my wife said to me while we were gathering our belongings in the waiting room. Then I noticed an important business bulletin had interrupted
Wheel of Fortune
. We watched live as Bill Gates, the world's richest man, signed papers to buy the television network where I worked. How would that affect me? They would clean house, and I would be fired tomorrow because my week hadn't been quite lousy enough.

I was so numb and bone-grindingly tired that I really didn't care. My father had taught me that jobs were simply places to go to make money for our families. My daughter was going to recover, and that was all that mattered. As for Bill Gates, if I ever saw his car in the parking lot I would probably steal his
NERDMOGUL
license plate and put it in Sally's room.

I am a father who would do anything for his family, and while Bill Gates is probably also a good dad who has made trillions with Microsoft, the truth is, I can shred his high score on Tetris.

Should I Follow Tom or Diane Sawyer?

T
om Sawyer
was the Million Dollar Movie my dad and I were watching when he pointed to the star's raft and revealed, “I built one of those.” My father had chronicled much of his childhood, but the raft thing was tantalizingly new information. My immediate reaction was that if my father had done it, I should do it too. Some families from one generation to the next hand down heirloom jewelry, odd parcels of real estate, or gravy recipes; I would follow in my father's footsteps and make raft building our family tradition. Additionally, the idea of my own personal watercraft would put me on par with Ari Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate who was at that time married to Jackie Kennedy, the former first lady, and pictures of the two of them gallivanting on his yacht seemed to make the covers of every supermarket tabloid my mother bought.

Why'd the pretty lady marry the guy with the gut? I'd wonder years before I learned he was worth three-quarters of a gazillion dollars, and as I now know, vast wealth is very slimming.

My father gave me permission and a pile of unused lumber to set up a dry dock in the basement of our ranch house on Margaret Street in Russell, Kansas. A third-generation do-it-yourselfer, I used what I'd observed in the movie as the inspiration and general concept for the raft. There was one gigantic problem with me building that thing: I was only seven years old. As I look back, the State of Kansas Department of Transportation should have come to our house and ar
rested my dad on the spot because having a second grader build a watercraft clearly fell into the category of unwise things that should never be attempted, like singing karaoke sober.

I cobbled together as simple a flatboat as you could imagine, a wooden platform on a couple of two-by-fours. This was the first time I'd ever constructed something from scratch, and my father had encouraged me to add some extras. I chose something neither my father nor Tom Sawyer had on his raft: a steering wheel. That would make it much easier for me to navigate around partially submerged tree stumps as I spent lazy afternoons floating downstream. When I turned the primitive wheel side to side nothing happened. It wasn't hooked to anything and didn't really work, because a seven-year-old with a hammer has the mechanical wherewithal of a raccoon.

With the assembly complete, it was time for the final flourishes. I plugged my wood-burning iron into a basement plug and waited twenty seconds for it to heat up to nine thousand degrees, then branded the boat with a name that would surely be the envy of every second-grade boy:
Kon Stinki
.

During the final construction phase the excitement of my project had spilled over into a conversation with some school chums, who a few days later dropped by unannounced for a viewing. I wasn't ready to officially unveil it, so I did the adult thing and hid behind the water heater pretending I wasn't home. But my grandma was and told them to take a peek in the basement window. When I heard giggling, I assumed it was “That is so cool” laughter, but it was followed by “And look at that dorky steering wheel!” Another added, “Idiot,” as they adjourned to spread more goodwill around the neighborhood and doubtless torture a cat with a red-hot poker.

For the first time in my young life I felt absolute humiliation. Getting your pants pulled down between classes was one thing, but this was personal. It was my own creation—why didn't they understand that? Rejected, dejected, and generally feeling rotten, I mothballed the project. My father arrived home in time to watch the final fifteen minutes of
The Mike Douglas Show,
but my mom confided what had
happened and he went directly to the basement, where I was using a pry bar to rip the pine plank captain's chair out of the SS
Laughing-stock
.

“Whatcha doing?”

I told him I'd decided not to finish it, because it was a stupid idea.

“Lemme see that hammer,” he said, and in that magic dad way, he helped me put things back together on my raft and in my heart. “It looks seaworthy to me. Let's plunk it in water.”

Instantly I forgot my previous heartbreak and started planning the maiden voyage. Lazy rivers are in short supply in western Kansas, but there are plenty of cow ponds, and my dad secured permission from one of his farmer friends to float my boat. When we arrived I personally thanked the landowner for the use of his lagoon, and I quickly discovered why my father nicknamed him Van Gogh—the man could talk your ear off.

Van Gogh, my dad, and I carried the raft from the trunk of my father's T-bird down to the water's edge. I just listened as the chatty farmer in the OshKosh overalls said things like “You can't milk a donkey if you don't have a pail.”

Climbing into the captain's chair, I firmly gripped my faux steering wheel as my father and the farmer pushed it across the muck into the pond. It was a flawless launch, until the raft sank.

Not expecting a dunking, I was grossed out beyond belief, having just sucked the brown water from the cattle watering hole down my mouth and nose. My immediate damage assessment was that I'd sprung a leak, because that's how a second grader thinks, but in reality there was nothing to leak. It was supposed to float because that's what wood does—I simply needed more wood.

“My first raft sank too,” my father lied. “Let's tell Mom we hit an iceberg.”

The farmer, my father, and I dragged the shipwreck from the muck and mire and brought it high enough up the bank to keep it from being a cow hazard. The last thing I remember Van Gogh saying after
abandoning ship was “You can put wings on a sheep, but it's still not a duck.”

I'd loved the idea of building a raft as my father had, but there was a reason the world didn't use that form of water travel anymore: it was tricky and dangerous, and the widespread construction of rafts was most certainly best left to disgruntled Cubans.

From that day I became leery of any rituals from bygone eras that might have been popular once but, given advancements in science and recreation, were hopelessly outdated. “Don't make any plans for Saturday—I've signed you up for the father-son fishing derby,” my wife informed me a generation later. Another time-consuming and quasi-dangerous throwback to the golden days, but my wife convinced me that if I didn't give my son a taste of some he-man activities, he'd wind up an adult child with few pastimes aside from folding cloth napkins into rabbits and hats.

When I was his age I loved to fish; my grandmother and I would spend hours on the banks of the Upper Des Moines, waiting for a nibble. I don't know if she really liked the sport or just wanted to chain-smoke Camels. My father was in charge of our bait. The night before a fishing expedition, Dad would turn on the garden hose and soak the grass, and presto, half an hour later, we'd go outside with flashlights and simply pick up the night crawlers that were luxuriating on the cool damp grass. These gargantuan worms were so big that if the fish didn't bite at them, one could just punch a carp and knock it out cold.

When my wife signed me up for the fishing derby, we were living where king-size worms were in short supply. Plus, I was always iffy about using a spade in New Jersey. “It's okay, kids, it's only Hoffa's toe.”

I tried my father's hose trick, but Jersey worms have an attitude and won't come out of their holes for water unless it's San Pellegrino. Instead, I'd have to actually dig down into our garden to locate one. How does grass grow on concrete? I wondered after I turned over about two Advils' worth of dirt before I laid hands on half a worm, seconds after my shovel performed an accidental wormectomy.

“Pick him up, Peter.”

“Him?” My son was horrified that our bait had a gender. I reminded him that there were trophies involved, and he promptly deposited the mortally wounded half worm in our bait bucket.

“Daddy, where are the fish?” was asked so many times in the derby's first hour that at one point I turned to see if my son had recorded that query and was playing back a tape. I knew the problem was our lure: the bait had croaked on the way to the fishing derby.

“Peter, look over there in those cattails for another worm.” Ten minutes later he returned with a real squirmy one that he insisted he put on the hook himself.

“Good job, Pete!” I said loudly enough for the father and son next to us to hear. They had demoralized us many times that morning because each time they hooked a tiny sun perch, they yelped as if they'd just reeled in another great white.

“Be careful, that hook is sharp,” I reminded as he struggled to pierce the razor-sharp curve through the worm's hind end. It was at that time that I first noticed the critter's distinctive markings and coloring.

“Peter, drop that thing! It's not a worm, it's a live baby water moccasin!”

We don't know who got the trophies, because we were in the emergency room making sure he'd not been injected with whatever factory-installed poison water moccasins have at the ready. In the waiting room I reminded myself that fishing, just like raft building, was an antiquated and dangerous leisure-time activity. Why would anyone subject himself to possible West Nile infection standing downstream from a leaking sewage-treatment plant? More to the point, why do people still fish today, especially if we've got Mrs. Paul out there somewhere reeling in the tilapia?

That was the last time we took our lives into our hands and went into the woods. I'd like to think it was from the fishing, but I think my son freaked out after I walked in and saw him watching
Deliverance.
The closest we've since been to a campout was during an elec
trical storm that knocked out the power to our neighborhood grid and forced the family to gather around a hurricane lamp in the living room. The thunder in the background provided the perfect atmosphere for ghost stories. The kids had never heard the one about the couple on lovers' lane who heard the radio bulletin about the guy with the hook for a hand who'd escaped from the mental hospital, and when they heard scratching on the side of the car they drove home, only to find the hook hanging on the door handle. I had goose bumps on my arms telling it.

“Dad, I saw that on an after-school special.”

An undaunted terror master, I moved on and explained how my father had built me a tree house when I was in fourth grade and I'd begged him to let me and a couple of friends sleep in the tree house before the end of the summer. Finally he said yes, and we camped out in the tree, until I woke up about three in the morning to discover I was alone because everyone else had gone home. It wasn't an adventure without my friends, so I went in the back door of my house and fell asleep in my own bed.

“When I went back into my house my dad heard the door close, and he got up to see what was happening. That was when he looked out and saw our weirdo neighbor who lived with five dozen cats climbing up the ladder.”

They were speechless. Mission accomplished.

“Dad, you never mentioned you had a tree house.”

After two weeks of nonstop begging I built one. Safety was always an issue, so I used dinosaur-bone-size bolts to hook it to the tree so it would be able to withstand a category-three hurricane before I'd have to call my insurance adjuster, who would inform me that I could not file a claim for something that was illegally constructed in violation of every building code in my town's big book of dumb rules.

In a moment of absolute coincidence that shows that there is some sort of cosmic connection between fathers and their sons, during one of our final supply runs to Home Depot, my boy, Peter, noticed one particular option they were selling for tree forts that he wanted
to install on his deluxe custom tree house. So I bought a sunshine yellow steering wheel.

I wanted to tell him that I had built my own steering wheel once, but he'd think I was about to launch into another one of those sepia-stained stories about walking five miles to school in the snow or writing with chalk on the back of a shovel, so I stopped and screwed the steering wheel to a beam next to the trapdoor.

“Every boy should have a tree house,” I announced to my wife at its grand opening.

“It's too high.” She had a point—it was. In fact, at that moment it was by far the most dangerous thing on our property.

I'd spent almost five hundred dollars on our backyard tower of terror, and after my wife's pronouncement of danger, our children were programmed to think that if they fell out, at the very least they'd spend the rest of their lives in an iron lung parked in the living room. On the plus side, we were the only ones on the block with a tree house that required an oxygen mask.

My son, for whom I built the high-altitude apartment, spent over the years a sum total of six minutes in the tree house, which averages out to about eighty-three dollars per minute of use. If I had it to do over again, I'd just give him a hundred-dollar bill and have him stand on my shoulders until the blood drained from my head and I wised up.

Tree houses, rafts, and fishing are charming things our parents did once upon a time but should now be verboten. I think it's time to cut the cord on obsolete outdoor activities. If it doesn't have an Underwriters Laboratories tag on it, don't use it. We simply aren't the same people we were two generations ago. Just ask a seventh-grade boy his impressions of Huckleberry Finn.

“Huckle
berry
…that's a new Tazo at Starbucks, right?”

This past weekend my wife, Kathy, and I were walking in our backyard and came to a stop under our long-abandoned tree house. “One of these days I should probably take that down.” Initially dangerous, it was presently full of dangling tree branches, making it even more
hazardous. It was sun baked and faded; the only piece still in good shape was the still bright yellow steering wheel on the side of the tree house.

“Maybe you could drive it into somebody else's tree,” my wife said, smiling.