Tales from the Dad Side (20 page)

That made perfect sense. Long before computers or microfiche or college-ruled paper, names and dates and fates were scrawled in big books by well-intentioned but illiterate Irish record keepers.

“Sometimes the handwriting in the book was hard to decipher, so the person recording it would have to make his best guess what it said. Sadly, many a name has changed through history because of bad penmanship.” She stopped for a moment and then added an additional reason for poor spelling. “Then again, the writer may simply have been drunk.”

Uncle Phil stated the obvious. “I vote for the drunk explanation.”

“That means,” the clerk continued, “your real family name could be Doocey, with an
e,
or Dewsy, or Dancy, or Dooley, or Deacy.” Then she shocked us with one more bit of news. “If you see an Irish name and it starts with the letter
d,
there's a relatively good chance you're related.”

And with that, I turned from a public scallywag of unknown heritage to a direct descendant of Phil Donahue. That was an explanation we would embrace—that our blood relatives had been misspelling our name since Saint Patrick drove the snakes that peed on the Blarney Stone off the island.

Relieved that our family did have some kind of roots, although misspelled ones, my father summoned the words to address this ma
jor development. “Maybe those kids in your school were right,” he said, looking directly at me. “You might be a Doofus, after all!”

The people upstairs in the archive stacks probably wondered what prompted the bedlam in the basement. I cannot remember a time we laughed longer or louder. Our genealogical quest complete, we devoted the rest of the trip to just laughing it up. We didn't mingle much with the twenty other mostly Americans on the bus tour until we pulled over and posed for a class photo in a lush green meadow. I found myself standing next to a thirty-something woman I'd seen riding up front with a woman I presumed was her mother, and I asked her how she was enjoying the ride around the island.

“It's okay, but there's too much sitting and not enough shopping.” She asked me if I missed the shopping.

“Are you kidding? I hate to shop. Luckily, my wife loves to. She calls it retail therapy.”

“Your wife?”

“Fifteen years, three kids.”

“Wow, we saw a forty-year-old guy traveling with his father and uncle, and we thought you were gay.”

“Who thinks I'm gay?”

“Everybody on the bus…except probably your father and his brother.”

“Actually, my dad considers me bi,” I joked, “because on this trip, I have to buy everything.”

She apologized for jumping to conclusions. “So why'd you leave your wife at home and take the Sunshine Boys for a ride?”

An excellent question from a total stranger. I explained that my mother had died just a few months earlier, and at that time my mom and dad had been planning the trip of a lifetime to Hawaii. After she passed away, even though he'd already bought the tickets for the trip, my dad refused to go without my mom.

“I just can't do it, Stephen,” he'd told me, and that's why I asked him if there was anyplace
else
in the world that he'd like to go, and of course that's what got us those three spots on the bus.

“I've been away from home a long time,” I told her. “I wanted to spend some time with my dad. My uncle was a bonus.”

A bittersweet trip for my dad—I'm sure he'd have loved to share it with my mom.

I was also a bit bummed out because at the beginning of our adventure I'd thought we'd roll up to a charming pub on a cobblestone street in a town we'd never heard of, and there would be our family name above the door. We'd walk in and somebody would say, “We've been waiting for you. I'm your third cousin. Call me Angus.”

For a change, I was in no hurry to go back, because I was appreciating my father for the first time not as my dad but as a man. He was funny and smart, and I couldn't believe the good fortune that I was related to him. After seven days and 220 bus miles, our trip was complete; the memories cast, it was time to go home. As our afternoon flight was starting to descend over Maine, I leaned over to my father, who was memorizing the Atlantic coast. I said, “That was fun, wasn't it?”

He paused for a moment. I'd clearly caught him deep in thought. “I felt like I was thirty all over again.”

When he was thirty, I was only ten. Every Saturday morning my father the traveling salesman would holler up the stairs “You coming?” I'd roll out of bed and hop in his truck, not knowing where the day would take us. I was my father's sidekick.

At lunch we'd stop at a roadside café where we'd order whatever the cook was having himself, and then by midafternoon, after a dozen sales calls, we'd usually wind up at Reilly's gas station shooting the breeze while nursing Dr Peppers that always tasted best when they had half a bag of peanuts bobbing in the top. By suppertime we'd pull up at home, having spent the entire day talking and laughing about nothing in particular.

But as I look back now, I see that on those long rides with my dad I learned more about people and places and politics and how the world works than I ever would from anybody else. At the time it seemed like I was keeping him company, but it was much more than
that. I was getting a master's degree in life from my pop. Back then, the reason I went was to spend time with my dad. It was exactly like our week on the bus.

My father was prophetic when he said that first day in Ireland, “By this time next week, we'll know where we came from.”

We saw where
he and I
came from, a place long ago and far away, where the thirty-year-old father was accompanied everywhere by his son. It was now thirty years later and the young man was now sleeping in the corner of a nice hotel room on a roll-away as two snoring brothers and members of AARP enjoyed the four-hundred-thread-count Irish linen sheets. That weeklong stiff neck from the Hide-A-Bed cost me nine thousand dollars, which I'd gladly pay again to be their tagalong traveling companion.

Ireland had a big impact on us. The enduring legacy of our trip is that a day probably doesn't go by when in over a dozen establishments that we visited, somebody who's trying to phone Jimmy Donnelly, Mary Dancy, or Billy Dooley simply can't, thanks to my father.

“Where's the
d
page of your phone book?”

If he really wanted it, he could find it half a world away in my father's top dresser drawer, safely parked next to a couple of unused tickets to Hawaii.

Goodnight Moon

F
atherhood is like Wikipedia, some parts based in fact, others just made up along the way. As a new dad I tried to plan ahead, but as I have learned over these many years, nothing ever works out exactly the way it was supposed to, so you have to ad-lib all the time. I have learned that the best plan is to be surprised.

My children were the reason I got up for decades in the middle of the night like a milkman to go to work. They are appreciative of the sacrifices my wife and I have made, and I hope they will make the same for their children. I am blessed to have been able to spend good times with these kids, but I know that in three years the last one will be off to college, and my perfect wife will be stuck with a creaky wheeze bag who rushes home from the Early Bird Special to watch Fred Barnes beat up Morton Kondracke and vice versa.

I'm already in bedtime-story withdrawal. Nobody wants me to read
Goodnight Moon
or
Love You Forever
to her anymore. The next domino to fall will be holding hands. The only regular hand-holder I've got left is Sally. On September 11, 2001, by ten o'clock in the morning, children at her school just outside New York were being called into the principal's office, and Sally was worried when some of them left screaming. Her third-grade teacher, who had gotten married on the top of the World Trade Center, was sitting on the floor crying; she told everybody that airplanes had hit skyscrapers in New York, the buildings had fallen, and many people were dead. Sally
heard that and thought, My daddy works in a New York skyscraper. He must be dead.

She sat in her classroom for five hours thinking that she would never see me again. She was expecting bad news when she got home. My wife told her I was fine, but because the bridges and tunnels were closed to traffic, I was stuck on the island of Manhattan for two nights and three days. When I eventually got home, the tears were pouring down her cheeks when she ran to hug me. She had never been much of one to hold hands, but starting that day whenever we were together she'd reach out for her father's hand. Sally is now a high school sophomore, and to her credit she gladly grips and grins when we walk together or during the Lord's Prayer in church, but just like everything else, I know those hand-holding days are numbered.

This past weekend my wife, Kathy, drove my daughters and me down toward Washington, D.C. Three hours into the trip I noticed that my chauffeur wife was steadily watching her rearview mirror for what I presumed was a tailgater.

“Look at Mary,” she whispered.

With her face pressed against the headrest, my college girl was asleep with the exact same face we'd see when she'd doze off in her car seat almost twenty years earlier. The exact same face.

Before we were blessed with these kids friends would say, “You better see plenty of movies before the baby comes along because after that, you'll be busy for a
long time
.” They were right—we were busy. But that
long time,
between Huggies and beer pong, wasn't really that long. One year I was reading them books they could chew upon, the next showing how to tie a shoe, and then it was how to ride a bike in the driveway. Their homework got too hard for me to help, so I hired tutors when necessary, and in one final act of bravery I put stamps on their college applications.

Pooft!

They were gone.

It goes fast.

An ambitious little boy, I dreamed that one day I'd invent some
thing or find a cure for a dreaded disease or write the great American novel that would be turned into a movie starring Meredith Baxter Birney, but somewhere along the way I discovered that those things were just lines on a résumé, and the older I got the more I realized that true immortality comes only from starting a family.

When I reminisce about my own childhood I see myself in the scratchy eight-millimeter home movies of the 1960s, chasing my sisters around the backyard after dinner drives to the Tastee-Freez, and on Friday nights we'd go to the Rocket Drive-in already wearing our pajamas because we'd fall asleep halfway through the second feature, unless it involved gunplay. In my head I'm twelve years old and my dad still has jet-black hair on the top, and I can still hear my pretty blond mom's laugh, which was so infectious that even if you were paralyzed with anger, you'd wind up snorting along with her. Now my mom is forever gone, and my only complete family reunion is when I close my eyes. I am lucky I have nice things to remember.

My college friend Carly Ellis told me that one of her greatest regrets was not saying “I love you” to her father at the end of a phone call, because the very next call she got was that her dad had been killed by a train while he was driving home. That was the day I stopped saying “Good-bye” to everybody, because you just never know. I substituted “
See you later”
because I never want that shared moment to be our last.

I hope my stories have reminded you of your own father or grandfather or maybe even mom or kid tales. I hope that your relationship with your family is good, but if it is not, something as simple as a letter or a phone call can be a terrific first step. Life is so much more complete when you go through it with people you share a bloodline with.

The key, I believe, is togetherness. At our house, dinner runs almost an hour from first bite to last laugh. Every one of the day's high crimes and misdemeanors is rehashed. Last week my wife told the table that she'd read there was a mini crime spree in our neighborhood, with an alarming number of random house robberies. Suitably
scared, we adjourned to watch a movie and promptly forgot about the police blotter.

This afternoon my son, Peter, who was home on a break, was taking a nap when he heard somebody stirring on the front porch. No car or truck in the front driveway. He peered out a side window and spotted a powerfully built stranger staring through first the front windows and then the front door.

The random house burglar, and he's casing the joint
.

A regular viewer of
America's Most Wanted,
Peter knew that if that man was about to rob us, he'd first ring the doorbell, and if nobody came, he'd break the glass and help himself to our family's priceless black velvet portraits.

Ding-dong.

If Peter did not answer the door, the burglar would find him crouching behind the NordicTrack, and that never ends well. I have told my children a million times not to open the door to total strangers, but Peter at age twenty was a man himself and made a strategic choice that could change his life. On the way to the front door he made a quick detour, and then, feeling his heartbeat in his throat, he opened the door a crack.

“Hi, just checking to see if anybody was home,” the guy said, just like in the movies. Next stop chalk outline. “Can I come in?”

Wearing blue jeans and a ripped T-shirt, the guy insisted he was there to fix our Internet.
Good cover story: where was his uniform or Internet repair truck?
Just back home from college, Peter didn't know whether our Internet was on the fritz, but he did know that if it was not working and he turned the guy away, it could be a week before a repairman, real or felonious, returned, and his father would miss important spam e-mail advertisements for herbal Viagra or announcements that he'd won the Scottish lottery.

Going against everything I had taught him, he invited the stranger into our home.

“It's over there.” Peter pointed the man toward the room with the computer. A Greta Van Susteren devotee, he knew not to lead the
guy into the room or he'd get jumped from behind and pounded into something with the consistency of guava jelly.

The “repairman” stood next to the computer, completely befuddled by the tangle of wires under our iMac. Peter got a terrible feeling in his craw that the man knew nothing about computers and in a moment Peter would face the ultimate moment of truth.

“Do you have a flashlight?” the guy asked.

“Sorry,” Peter said, knowing that a flashlight was the kind of blunt object these types were always using on dummies who opened front doors to local outlaws.

Peter stood there fully prepared for the worst. Unbeknownst to the interloper, just before he opened the door, Peter had gone into the kitchen, where he'd grabbed the deadliest thing in our house, a Smith and Wollensky steak knife, the same one I lopped off the end of my finger with. At that moment, with the perplexed perpetrator bent over less than a yard from my son, Peter was gripping the wooden handle of the knife inside the front pocket of his North Face coat. One wrong sudden move and my son was ready to plunge it into the guy's rib cage.

Then it happened!

The stranger fixed the Internet.

“Modem power cable burned out,” he announced, and within thirty seconds he replaced it with a new one from his pocket.

Peter didn't know that that morning I'd begged the Internet service provider to send somebody over to fix it. The repair guy parked his truck at the back of our driveway so he wouldn't block our cars, and he arrived in a T-shirt and not his uniform because he got called directly from a softball game.

“Next time don't answer the door,” I pleaded during another lecture on personal safety, just relieved Peter didn't know I kept our improvised explosive devices under the sink next to the Drano.

Now that I examine what he did, I'm relieved he didn't forget momentarily that the cutter was in his pocket and sit on it.

“Excuse me, Fixit Guy, could you drive me to the hospital? I just impaled myself on the knife I was going to stab you with….”

Thank goodness, nothing bad happened, but I keep returning to the larger question:
What was he thinking
when he opened that door? I keep coming back to the same answer: Peter has been faithfully watching and studying me for twenty years, and upon further review, the steak knife thing was definitely something of which I was capable.

Monkey see, monkey do.

A chip off the old block.

Like father, like…you get the idea.

As I think about it, who needs Smith & Wesson when you've got Smith and Wollensky?

I read somewhere that sibling rivalry ends at age fifty, but parental worry has no expiration date. A dad's job is never done. Fatherhood is a lifetime sentence, much like what Peter could have gotten if he had used that steak knife on the Verizon guy.