The Dog Says How (4 page)

dad’s day

I’m hearing a lot
of sound bites these days. It reminds me of being a kid when my dad would dispense his wisdom. We called them Dad’s Sayings.

My dad passed away back in 1985. Enough time has passed to where places we would frequent that used to make me miss him now somehow bring him back to me. Brands of cars that he once owned drive by and I remember words of advice he dispensed from the front seat, like “Kev, the day you own a pair of wingtips is the day I stop worrying about you.” Or “Kev, don’t get killed just ’cause you know how.”

I am now the age he was as I remember him best. Consequently many of the baffling things he did then are no longer mysteries, like constantly losing reading glasses or in a heated moment calling children or dogs by the wrong names. I keep looking in the mirror expecting to see him looking back at me. But I don’t. I don’t look like him.

But sometimes I do hear his odd phrases spring from my lips. Dad had a string of sayings that I use to this day, sayings that don’t really make sense to me: Hotter then a three-dollar pistol. Colder than old Billy Ned. One time he told me I was about as funny as a hole in the fence. When he got off my brother’s ten-speed bike one time he complained it was like a cheap hotel.

Cheap hotel? Three-dollar pistol? Who is Billy Ned?

Some of the phrases came from his farming background, like “You’re so educated you’re stupid.” Grampa hit me with that one, too. Or when we couldn’t get our go-cart to work Dad chimed in with “The loose nut is usually the one on the seat.” When we said it worked fine yesterday he said, “That’s what the farmer said about his dead mule.”

Dads were more Old Testament back then, more brimstone than parable. Advice was often accompanied by a thwack on the head. My friend Russ Swansen’s dad would thwack us on the head and say, “That’s for what I didn’t see.” I used to think, “how does he know?” If a neighbor planted a cottonwood tree more than one dad was heard to comment that he should be shot. I grew up believing planting a cottonwood was a capital offense. The dad of our neighbors, the Sloans, used to mix and match his sayings, like “It ain’t rocket surgery for crying outside.” Or his famous “I don’t know whether to brush my butt or wipe my teeth.”

One time my dad’s skill in coming up with a saying was put to the test. We were going to swimming lessons. My sister and her friend were in the front seat with Dad, and my brother and I were in back. Dad was talking about something that was tight, a jar lid. He said it was tighter than . . . then he stopped. Both my brother and I were curious as to his saying. We’d heard many of his tighter-than analogies. One used an ingenious combination of a mosquito’s anatomy and a rain barrel but none of these were appropriate for the present company. Finally he stammered, “It was tighter than the bark on a tree.” My brother and I wept with laughter but had to give the old man credit for the cobbled saying.

When I do use one of Dad’s obscure sayings sometimes I wonder if I’m getting it right. I have a friend these days named Misha. He was telling me not long ago that he told his nine-year-old son a joke: “A three-legged dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I’ve come for the man who shot my paw.’” His son laughs and laughs. The next day Misha overhears his son talking to one of his little pals. His son says, “A three-legged dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I’m looking for the man who shot my dad.’” Both the boys laugh and laugh.

The other day I was hanging out with my brother. We were taking his dock out of the lake and trying to get a rusted bolt off a section of it. My brother says, “This bolt is tighter than, . . .” then he paused a long time and said, “the bark on a tree.” We laughed our heads off. My nephews are standing there soaking it all in. Perfect. Dad’s phrase will live another generation.

So I’m thinking about Dad on this Father’s Day. Now I know a three-dollar pistol is hot because it’s stolen and a cheap hotel has no ballroom. I still don’t know who Billy Ned is but I say it anyway ’cause as Mr. Sloan would say, if you can’t stand the heat get off the pot.

view from the card table

There was never
a time when I felt further from fear than Christmas Eve riding in the way back of a 1965 Impala station wagon. My mom and dad are in the front seat, my sister in the back, and me in the way back, surrounded by blankets and pillows and wrapping paper and packages and my brother, who is tolerable only when he sleeps.

We’re on our way from Minnesota to Missouri to my grandparents’ farm, where my grandmother waits “worried sick” until we arrive. We drive through the Iowa countryside past the white-topped farmhouses, the long hog barns, the barren fields, and chattering cornstalks. My mom is singing, “What did Io-way boys? What did Io-way?” We answer back, “She weighed a Washing-ton, Mom. She weighed a Washing-ton.” Mom had a song for every state in the union. I remember her song for Wisconsin: “I love to live in Wisconsin, and smell the dairy-air.” Every time we pass a fence that’s over six feet tall, my dad says, “Look at that, boys, a nudist colony.” And we all run to that side of the car to try to get a glimpse at a nudist.

“Hey, Dad, what do nudists wear in the winter?”

“What do you think, boys? They bundle up. Nudists aren’t stupid.” Ah! those crafty nudists; of course, they bundle up.

We pull into a rest stop with two outhouses and a plaque declaring it an historic site. That’s all it says: “Historic Plaque.” The plaque never states why it’s historic and I imagine a great battle in the cornfield with cavalry and Confederates and doughboys and Knights of the Roundtable, and the Iowa peasants—“With these two outhouses, we will never forget what happened here today!”

As night falls, we enter Centerville, Iowa, the blinking lights streaming down from the courthouse spire to the four corners of the courtyard, the candy cane cannon a spiral of blinking bulbs. And across the street is the pool hall with one of the pool tables pulled up to the front window and a Nativity scene set right in the center. My mom says, “That just doesn’t seem right.” We pull into the Texaco filling station for gas. Now, it’s a little more expensive at Texaco, but with every fill-up, you receive a free Texaco Star Theatre Christmas Album: Bing Crosby, Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, Doris Day, star after star. And every year a different star tackles
The Drummer Boy.
This year, it’s Patsy Cline. “Oh, that cute little Patsy Cline,” my mom says. “How tragic. She makes me cry, makes me cry.”

“No,” my dad says, “you’re thinking of Connie Francis.”

“Oh, whoever. She makes me cry, makes me cry, makes me cry . . .”

And with the rear window framing moonlit Iowa like a black-and-white photograph, the rocking of the Chevy suspension and the AM radio gently telling me a storm is moving directly into our path, I pray to Jesus to remind God to ask Santa about that squirrel monkey in the back of
Spider-Man
for $9.99. Oh! and I want a
good
monkey, not like the neighbor’s monkey, who had no sense of modesty according to my mom. No, I want a
good
monkey and a squirrel monkey, not a sea monkey. Those are a rip-off. Squirrel monkey. Now, earlier, I bribed my brother to ask my dad how much he loved me.

“Why, we love Kevin a lot.”

“Nine ninety-nine . . . do you love him $9.99?”

“He is
not
getting that squirrel monkey!”

But in my prayer, I feel I got through to the reasonable Jesus, and soon visions of a squirrel monkey for $9.99 dance in my head.

When I wake up, I’m not in the station wagon anymore. It’s Christmas morning and I’m upstairs in the farmhouse where my grandparents live and—puh puh. I’m spitting out—puh puh—little pieces of yarn from under a pink chenille bedspread. I wake up my brother and we run downstairs, the plastic feet in our pajamas slapping the oak floor. And there’s Grandpa and he kisses me with that stubby farmboy beard, taking off a layer of facial epidermis. Then, Grandmother comes in. Grandmother scared me; she had those huge earlobes from wearing clip-on earrings her whole life . . . huge earlobes that scared me in a
National Geographic
kind of way. And Grandmother hugs me and she smells like every flower I’ve ever smelled at once. “Grandmother, let me go. There are presents to unwrap!” There are promises to keep. That’s why we’re here, for heaven’s sake.

We run into the living room where the tree is piled high with presents. And my sister is the elf that year, because she can read, but she needs to sound out every word, and we can guess the name even before she’s done, but she hangs in there ’til the last syllable, “Grrr . . . Grrraa . . . Grrrannma . . . Grrannma . . . Grandma . . . Grandma . . . Grandma . . .”

“Grandmother! It’s Grandmother. Would you give her the present?”

And she hands Grandmother her present and she opens it up really slow, careful not to rip any of the paper, and she unveils this Russian fur hat from my dad, who claims he got it for my grandpa and must have got the boxes mixed up. Oh, but she won’t give it up. No. She puts on the Russian hat and she looks good to me, like a Siberian empress with huge earlobes denoting royal blood.

Then, I dive into my presents, first opening all the boxes that look like my brother’s presents. Then, I hold up the contents and show him what he’s about to receive. Next, come presents from Mom and Dad, because that’s usually clothes or something I need, and then the last present is Santa’s present—always the best—because Santa knows me. He knows the
me
of me. And I tear into the wrapping paper and reveal a box, which holds a plastic World War II P-40B fighter plane, a Flying Tiger, with a real gas-powered engine, hand controls, and a two-string guidance system. I mean, this is not a toy. This is something a
man
would play with. My brother and sister are, likewise, in heaven. My sister got a Chatty Kathy doll. When you pull the string, it talks, and the two of them are having a
meaningful
conversation in the corner. My brother’s got his G.I. Joe and he’s already twisting it, making screaming noises. And I look over at my dad, and my dad is smiling at me. My dad, the pilot in real life, is proud. He walks over and says, “Kev, what do ya’ say after dinner, we fire that s.o.b. up?” That’s when the fear sets in, because with my dad standing there, I’m going to have to fly this plane. I don’t know how to fly this plane. Why, I know my dad could fly it. I even know my brother could fly it, but I know I can’t. I know that I’ll crash. I
know
I do
not
have the right stuff!

Now, I don’t know how many people subscribe to the theory of predestination. I, for one, am a firm believer. I came across it during a reading of
Tristram Shandy,
where the protagonist, Tristram Shandy, describes his conception. Now, apparently, at the beginning of each month, his father, Lord Shandy, performed two tasks. One was to wind the family clock and the second was to perform his, well, husbandly duties with his wife, Lady Shandy. It was during part two of said ritual, and, in fact, at the moment of truth, that Lord Shandy suddenly remembered he forgot to wind the clock. It was due to this moment of indecision, this most inopportune moment, this moment of his conception, that Tristram Shandy attributes his own indecisiveness in life and his need to sometimes fall off course. My own conception, I found out years later, happened when Pope Pius XII was entertaining Liberace at the Vatican. Liberace called it, “the single most inspirational moment of my life.” Lord only knows what the Pope was thinking, maybe singing to himself, “I don’t know how to love him,” from
Jesus Christ Superstar
—but I digress. Anyhow, if you subscribe to the theory of predestination, which I do, and couple it with the unfortunate astrological phenomena of Pisces with Aquarius rising, it all leads to an overly sensitive, truth-seeking, pencil neck that will
never
get that plane off the ground!

Christmas dinner. All the relatives start to arrive: Aunt Charlene and Aunt Floy, two aunts that hug me, call me by my brother’s name, and say how much I’ve grown. Then, they tell me how much I look like Uncle Bob, who is not with us anymore. Aunt Floy starts to cry and Aunt Charlene assures her that Uncle Bob is better off where he is. Hmmm. Oh! and then Uncle Johnny arrives, our favorite uncle. Uncle Johnny, who whenever he points at something, uses the middle finger, making the most obscene gesture.

“Which is the biggest barn, Uncle Johnny?”

“Well, I’d say it’s that one there.”

“Ahh!” We’re cracking up. Then, we run to him with a map of Iowa. “Show us how to get home on the map, Uncle Johnny.”

“Well, you go up here like this. I show you boys this every year.”

My brother and I are laughing our heads off! Uncle Johnny is laughing, too, for reasons unknown. Oh! and I love the way my relatives from the South talk, that Midwestern drawl-l-l, that sitting-in-the-shade-tree-with-a-glass-of-lemonade drawl-l-l . . . the word “win-n-shiel-l-d wi-i-i-per” is its own sentence. I mean, there are words you have to sit down for.

They all file into the dining room around the big table, lengthened with extra leaves and covered with an embroidered tablecloth and candles and mistletoe napkins. And in the center, there’s Santa with his reindeer. Oh, but it’s not just Santa and reindeer; it’s really a gravy boat. All the adults sit around the big table while all us cousins are out on the porch, where it’s a little bit cold, and we’re sitting around card tables. And there are our plates in front of us. Someone’s already made my plate for me. Hey! I don’t want some of this. I mean, the four basic meat groups are all represented. There’s cranberry sauce, Jell-O, red (or it’s not Jell-O), next to the mashed potatoes, where it can bleed into the side. My uncle stands up and announces grace. Uncle Dale is the preacher in real life, so everyone gets quiet. We bow our heads and hear a slight whistling sound, “Whrrr, whrrr, whrrr,” and everyone knows that’s Aunt Floy breathing through her nose. “Whrrr, whrrr, whrrr.” Aunt Floy always had a clogged nostril and a little something in the other one, so it sounded like someone was running back and forth in the other room in corduroys. Uncle Dale blesses the food and our fellowship and that everyone made it safe. He prays in Jesus’ name and calls him, “Our Savior.” Our Savior. I start thinking, Jesus is our Savior? Don’t you have to be in big trouble to be needed to be saved? I mean, doesn’t a drowning person need to be saved? And Jesus is constantly having to come to earth to save us. What does that mean?

Then, I remembered the Meyers’s cats. My friend, John Klein, was hired to watch the Meyers’s two cats while they were out of town, these lazy, hedonistic cats. I mean, I never saw ’em move, but there were signs of destruction everywhere: chair legs shredded down to toothpicks, an acrid odor in one corner. But, you’d look at these cats and they’d sit there like, “Yes, I know. It was like that when I got here, too.” Lazy, hedonistic cats. So anyway, Mr. Meyer told John to feed them twice a day and give them a treat “when you think about it.” John and I laughed at what the treat might be. Then, one day, about a week later, we’re riding our bikes, and I mention to John, “How’s it going with the cats?”

John hits his brake and says, “The cats! The cats! Oh, the Meyers’s cats! I forgot all about them.”

I said, “They’ll be okay, John. They can go a couple of days without food.”

“No!” he says, “it hasn’t been a couple of days. It’s been a week! I forgot this whole week.”

So we raced over to the Meyers’s, and the cats were still alive, but, I mean, just barely. Luckily, the toilet seat was up, so they’d had something to drink. And when they saw John, they didn’t think, “Oh, there’s the guy who forgot us.” No, they saw John as the one who saved them. Every time John came back from then on, those cats would see him and go crazy. “Oh, there he is! He’s back.” I wondered if that happened to God. “Earth. I forgot all about earth. Oh, my, me, I better get down there. Hey, what if they’re mad at me? I know, I’ll send the kid.” And Jesus came down, and we all went crazy like the cats.

Uncle Dale nears the end of the prayer, and I know exactly what I’m going to do. As soon as he says, “Amen,” I’m going for the gravy boat, because gravy is the one thing we have control over at the card table. Uncle Dale says, “Amen,” and I go for the gravy, but my brother’s already in it, ladling it up. That sinner had skipped the “Amen!”

Meanwhile, this little dog named Lady starts to bark, “Rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff.” Lady is one of those little dogs with the rust stains in the eaves of her eyelids; she’s always shaking like she’s cold and barking like there’s a fire. “Rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff.” When Lady barked her high-pitched bark, she numbed something in the back of your hypothalamus. “Rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff.” My brother takes a piece of ham and starts to tease Lady. “Rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff,” and right before Lady has a heart attack, he throws the piece of ham . . . and it sticks on the top of Lady’s head! “Rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff.” Now, she can smell the ham, but she can’t see where it is. She’s running around in circles! “Rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff, rooff,” and then shoots through different parts of the house! All the cousins jump off the card table! Ahhh, Christmas at the Klings, and we start running around the perfect oval racetrack that’s formed from the porch to the hallway, to the kitchen, to the dining room, and every time we hit the dining room, we’re hit with a volley of threats, “In my day, you kids . . . hickory sticks . . . woodshed . . . G. Gordon Liddy.” And as we hit the porch again, my brother can’t resist grabbing a little bite of turkey but, in his haste, he knocks his plate off the card table and sends his Christmas dinner flying. By the time we arrive, Lady has secured most of the evidence, but my brother is in the corner hiccupping, crying the word, “Tur-key, tur-key, tur-key,” over and over. My mom fixes him another plate, sits him down, and says, “You see! You see what happens, you kids! Now, you
sit
back down and
enjoy
your Christmas dinner!” My brother stares at his plate unable to eat. I quietly remind him of the ham on Lady’s head, and with tears on his face and turkey on his fork, he starts to laugh and takes a bite.