Tales from the Dad Side (18 page)

The Innings and Outings of Life

S
ome boys become men when they join the marines or on their honeymoon night. Always trying to take the road less traveled, I became a man at a Chinese restaurant.

Kansas is a state where salad bars uniquely feature chocolate cake and a simmering kettle of gravy, so anything off our regular caveman red meat diet was always appreciated, and that's why Mars Chinese on the west side of Salina was one of my family's favorite places. The Mars family knew Kansans were hopelessly addicted to starches, and that's why they always had one additional table item that I've never seen in any Chinatown: a quarter loaf of Wonder bread.

“I'll pick that up when you're ready,” the waitress with chopsticks in her hair said, dropping off the bill.

And with that my father launched into an oft-told story about a guy he met on an army troopship who was assigned to kitchen duty and, during rough seas, threw up into the scrambled eggs. As my sisters grimaced, I realized something was wrong—my father, who was always in a hurry to leave, hadn't budged. Usually when the waitress brought the bill he'd say, “Here you go,” and pay her in cash on the spot before she had time to walk away.

“So this guy took the egg beater, mixed 'em up, and then cooked it!” At which point his tale got a gagging look from my sister Lisa.

Why wasn't my dad picking up the bill? Let's go and get out of here. He knew it was there—I'd seen him eyeball it when the wait
ress dropped it off. Yet he just sat there yakking away. Did he want another cookie; was this one of the early stages of dementia? Then I got an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach as it dawned on me:
he wanted me to pay
.

That meal was at my suggestion to celebrate my new job in Wichita, where I was pulling in a substantial eighteen grand a year, which my father thought was a lot for a single kid with no student loans. Why not? I thought as I slid the brown fake leather folder that was parked in front of my father over to my side and opened it to assess the financial damage.

“What are you doing, Stephen?” my mom asked.

“I'm paying.”

“No you're not. Jim, pick that up.”

“If he wants to,” my dad said, as if it were a teachable moment. “He's got a job. He can handle it.”

Initially I was a little offended that my father wanted me to take care of the bill, but as he argued with my mom, I oddly
wanted
to pick it up. It was a sign that I wasn't just a kid anymore; I was an official taxpaying, paycheck-cashing breadwinner, and that day the bread was Wonder.

The bill was twenty-nine dollars. I used a credit card, and five ones for the tip. My father was beaming:
My son can afford to throw around five dollars.
My mother, however, was less altruistic. “That's too much,” and she took two bills off the pile and stuffed them into my shirt pocket as we left the restaurant the day I became a man.

That was when life was simple, but then things sped up. I got married, had kids, big jobs, and bigger problems. Where did the time go? It seemed like just yesterday I was a wild and crazy college kid who'd get up for breakfast during
60 Minutes
. I blinked, and now I was wearing the daddy pants, as a father of three, with a wife who'd occasionally remind me of her love by telling me it was time to trim my nose hairs, “Unless you want me to braid them.”

While I may feel like an antique, my children keep me young and on my toes, especially with my reputation as the Mr. Answer Man of
the family. Rather than actually find answers in their textbooks, they just bark out questions, and I bounce back accurate answers.

“Hey, Dad, the country of Siam is now known as…what?”

Once, I was able to confidently spit out the answers with the speed and precision of Alex Trebek hopped up on an Italian espresso speedball, but as my kids entered middle school, things were getting mixed up in my head.

“Daddy, Siam…”

My reputation as the family's walking, talking human encyclopedia teetering, I remembered that Siam is the setting for
The King and I
and that Siam is the root of “Siamese,” but that's not a country, it's a cat. I closed my eyes and took an educated guess based upon the fact that they sound alike. “Siam is now Ceylon,” I confidently hedged.

“Very funny, Daddy! It's Thailand.”

Geographic trivia was hard because the world kept changing. I was still an expert at the basics until my son, Peter, asked me for help with high school physics, and as he verbally announced his equation, all I could see was numbers with arrows at the end pointing to other numbers. Stupefied, I did the only thing a father could do: I hired a physics tutor.

As my children's homework got harder, the trips to Dad slowed to a trickle, and instead the kids asked one another. What happened? I wondered, thinking back to the time when I could rattle off all fifty state capitals, and even name the U.S. president who invented the folding chair.

The mental acuity was bound to fade, but I would always be the biggest and the strongest member of the family because my girls weren't WNBA material and their brother was only five eight his junior year. At his age I was already six one, so he was destined to always stand in the shadow of his father, where he belonged. Inexplicably, the next year my boy grew an astonishing eight inches. It was at that time that I seriously questioned whether the makers of chicken fingers had replaced Crisco with human growth hormone.

To camouflage the fact that I was no longer the tallest, I refused
to be photographed next to him unless seated, and at church, our only weekly joint appearance, I would motion for him to walk to the altar first, followed by his vastly shorter sisters and mother, before I'd bring up the rear. The girls created a visual buffer during that walk for Communion, which heightwise was like a police lineup, with genuflecting.

His son is half a head taller. Next thing you know, Steve'll be bald, the monsignor surely thought every time he placed bread in the hands of the height-challenged dad.

While my own father was baldish, the substantial hair loss thing would never happen—and if it did I'd get plugs, a hair-replacement system, or as a last resort one of those Eva Gabor wigs that my mother's friend Nancy wore, and which she said were easier to shampoo than real hair because she washed them in the dishwasher. Just to be safe, later tonight I'll look on the KitchenAid site for the correct setting for wavy blond.

A tough year for the family alpha male. I could no longer help my son with his homework, he was half a head taller, and all I had left on my side was sheer strength. I could still beat him in a footrace from the street to the garage, and when we'd lift our big ladder to clean out the gutters, he could not keep it steady; I was clearly the Schwarzenegger member of the family. To remind him of that known fact, I challenged him to a duel.

We were watching March Madness; my alma mater, Kansas, had just gotten whupped by my son's Villanova team. I protested and said that the game was a fluke. Then, stacking the deck in my favor, I told him that the best way to determine the better team was for us to wrestle. I'd been a respectable high school wrestler, and I scored two points on a tricky takedown, his spindly frame making a dull thud on the hardwood floor as his mother commanded, “Peter, don't hurt your father.”

She was a real laugh riot, because I was in the process of proving that I was still the family's top dog. At eighteen years old he could drive a car, go to college, kiss girls when necessary, but he could not
possibly overpower his father, who, at age fifty, was 175 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal.

I smiled as I dominated him and asked him if he'd had enough. “No,” he spat, and he continued to thrash beneath me until one of his much longer arms hooked me and I was suddenly wedged between the couch and our Pottery Barn console table, which looked better in the catalog without a middle-aged man's head pitifully crushed up against its rich mahogany veneer. I had one other immediate observation as I lay there:
I CAN'T BREATHE!

A weird sleeper hold was now in danger of cutting off the air supply to my brain. Wiggling around and throwing my legs every which way except toward our brand-new fifty-inch plasma screen, I was in trouble. Resorting to the only thing a man desperate to hold on to his youth would do, I inched into position to give him an illegal kidney punch that would immediately make him let me go. One little wallop and I'd be back on my feet, like Ali standing over Sonny Liston. Then the father voice kicked in.
You can't hurt your own son, you dope,
which was true, because someday I would need him to pay our monthly room and board at a fancy assisted-living home where every Tuesday a former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader would teach water aerobics.

“You win,” I wheezed out in defeat. He peeled himself off me and then gave me a little look, worried he'd broken an important father part. It was a landmark moment as the title of strongest guy in the house was ripped out of the grip of the old man and now belonged to the boy. To his credit, Peter did not rub it in; he simply returned to the television to watch other very tall young men run up and down the court as I wondered how many of them could beat up their fathers. Life had just slapped me in the face with the subtlety of a sock filled with horse manure.

My daughter Mary, an all-around fabulous girl, followed in her brother's scholarly footsteps. A student leader and serious student (the New Jersey Academic Decathlon gold medal winner in Civil War art and silver medalist in economics), she was half a light-year ahead of anything I could help her with homeworkwise. That meant
I was down to one family member whom I could still beat. Sally. She was eleven.

By far the most innocent, every night at bedtime she'd write a note that I'd wake up and read in the morning. It was festooned with stick figures depicting the two of us. I was worried about her many serious misspellings of common words, but relieved knowing she would always be my little jejune ingenue. And then out of nowhere during a routine dinner conversation, Sally protested a point her brother had made.

“That's not relevant!”

So shocking, and so unexpected—the entire table paused momentarily and then burst into spontaneous appreciative applause. “Sally just used
relevant,
” an astonished Mary proudly announced. “And she used it correctly!”

Uh-oh. Her use of a big word in everyday conversation had to be a fluke. Just like the wild idea that given plenty of time, a thousand monkeys with typewriters would eventually bang out all the works of Shakespeare. In real life, researchers left a computer keyboard in a cage full of monkeys for a month, and all they did was type a lot of
s
's and
d
's, two letters not found in Romeo or Juliet. Sally had surely parroted “relevant” as something she had heard on
Hannah Montana
. That was my firmly held belief until one evening I walked into the kitchen as her mother asked her to get a box of noodles out of a drawer.

“What genre pasta, Mom?”

Genre?
I didn't use that in a sentence until I was forty. Check, please; everybody had grown up and passed me by, and suddenly the father figure was feeling not so relevant. The torch had been passed from my generation to my children's, so when given the opportunity to perform at a very public spectacle, I knew it was important that our family be represented by our best athlete.

“Peter, how would you like to throw out the first pitch at a Mets game?” I asked my stronger/taller/smarter son.

Fox & Friends
cohost Brian Kilmeade and I had been asked to
throw out the ceremonial first pitch at Shea, but before we agreed, we huddled and asked if our sons could have the honor. The Mets didn't care, so I asked Peter to do the honor.

“Are you kidding?”
my son screamed, accepting the challenge.

Thus started ten days of intensive practice for
the Pitch
. He'd been a solid high school and American Legion ballplayer, but it's a long ways from the chalk circle in the dirt field at Coolidge School to the pitching rubber at Shea Stadium. In my mind I could see him standing there, throwing out the ball to a thunderous ovation and getting a Triple-A contract and a shoe deal before one of the Jersey Boys belted out the national anthem.

We practiced for hours each day after school, and what I realized was that sixty feet is a long way to throw something in front of tens of thousands of strangers with any kind of precision, and suddenly my great idea was haunting me—what if he bounces it, or it flies over the catcher's head? This single toss had the possibility of being the most embarrassing thing he'd ever done in public, and if that happened, whom would he have to thank? His father.

“You don't have to do it,” I told him the evening of
the Pitch
as we walked out of the tunnel under the stadium into the bluish white television lights.

Peter said nothing, and I could tell he was freaked out. We stood in the on-deck circle, and as the public address announcer said his name, I shook his hand, and it was wringing wet. Now I worried that the ball would slip out of his sweaty palm. A Zapruder moment. I remember every single frame of what happened next. Having coached baseball, I saw that his ball release was much harder than we'd practiced; obviously it was a case of nerves, meaning it would probably veer wide and paralyze an inattentive batboy, landing my son on the cover of the
New York Post
. Within six months he'd be clinically depressed and addicted to painkillers and living out of the trunk of a car in Queens. I wished I had never asked him to do this.
Peter, why did you have to throw it that hard? That's not the way I would have done it.

Certainly not—it was a perfect strike.

“Kid, you've got a great cutter,” the Mets catcher said as he tossed Peter the game ball.