Saturday, March 29, 2014

Dad’s Greatest Hits!

As my dad’s health is declining, I’m remembering what a funny/strange man he was. He would say and do things, that are now the stuff of family legend.

For example,  I had a friend over for a sleepover. We were all eating breakfast when my dad started humming the tune to “My Favorite Things”.  He started softly, then got progressively louder.  I was used to goofiness like this, but my friend was not.

She never came over again.

He had nicknames for my sister’s boyfriends.  TJ became RV,  Bob became DooBob, and so on.

I was not immune, though I had no boyfriends until college. A male friend of mine from Junior High, who would buy me snow cones, was dubbed, “Snow Cone Fellah”. Another friend  became known as a “young Richard Nixon”.

When dad found out I was going to a friend’s apartment community to swim, I wore a bikini and my mom’s cover up. This prompted dad to admonish, “ Don’t let him play with your ass.”

My jaw dropped.


He was fumbling for a utensil in the kitchen, but said utensil got stuck in the drawer, and this immediately became my fault. “You should go to dishwasher unloading school!” he barked.  WTF!?

My cousin remembers a time dad asked me to get something, and I hesitated, making my dad yell, “Dammit Eden, don’t pull a Scotty on me!” I knew what he meant. He was comparing me to the Scotty the can’t do it engineer from Star Trek. My cousin just thought he was overreacting, which is also true.


These are all incidents we laugh about now, though I don’t think we did at the time.