Father's Day

I created cards for my Dad and my wife's Dad at work. Having access to an HP Indigo is nice, and while the stock we use isn't as heavy as I'd like, it's close enough for jazz. Having access to a great supply of stock photos and good graphics software doesn't hurt either. I can always think of ways they can be better, but bottom line, I gave four hours of my time in designing, printing, scoring, folding rather than six bucks to the Greeting Card Industrial Complex.


The Lobster hanging with Dad on Father's Day '05.


And they're one of a kinds, I'm all about that. And doing my Dad's got me to thinking about the memories both good and bad I have of Dad.

It'd be an exceptional person who would have no mixed feelings about their parents, but my Dad and I had more than Standard Issue tension. He wasn't abusive, and I wasn't quite a delinquent, it's nothing as dramatic as what I know some people go through.

There was a period not long after my parents divorced though, where we weren't on speaking terms. I opted out of the joint custody arrangement my folks had set up after an idiotic and overblown argument, start of which I can't recall. I'm not sure we fully mended fences until I was out of high school, though I think it was only a year or two where we were totally estranged.

So if I work at it, (didn't Epicureus have a formula for making yourself love someone or quit loving them by focusing only on their virtues or vices?), I can still conjure some of my adolescent and even pre-adolescent rage over things my Dad was unreasonable (in my view), insensitive, etc. about. It's a silly thing to do, since I was guilty of some of the most obnoxious manifestations of teen rebellion and a lot of Dad's would have written me off and turned their backs totally and forever.

But of course, I wasn't really on that wavelength anyway, because I was trying to come up with a Father's Day Card. A Hallmark moment.

I quickly came up with more things than I could fit on the card. My Dad took me down to the railroad tracks in the town we lived in until I was five, and we laid coins on the track for the train to flatten. The trains were slow there, pulling away from a grain elevator, I believe. I've tried it where I live now, but a 60mph train may flatten a coin, but you'll never find, it gets flung, probably against the underside of the car, then who knows where it ricochets. And in the bottoms by the haunted houses, where the trains move slow, I encountered a Railroad Bull who was hands down the baddest law enforcement character I've ever met.

Dad taught me and my brother to play poker, draw and stud, at my Grandma's apartment. He had a set of chips (much less elaborate than the immitation casino chips that are popular today), and it wasn't for money, just for a change from Hearts and Gin, but in the process he also told us great stories about his time in the Navy, which is naturally where he did most of his poker playing.

He made us rubber band guns, bigger than normal, and made rubber bands from an old inner tube that we could duel with. Shows how far times change, a guy could probably get a visit from Social Services doing that today. We had cap guns too, and they didn't have any markings to show they weren't real back then. BB guns were okay but not to shoot at each other, so he got us these guns that shot little green plastic pellets that couldn't put an eye out, and we shot each other up with those too. For whatever reason, the more serious pellet guns were not allowed, nor were decent slingshots.

He took us fishing when I was very young. The height of my fishing career was age four or five, when I caught a 12-inch bass. And kites, conventional and box, we flew those.

Music was a source of conflict for us, with his demand that I engage in 'balance time' for instance (this was an hour-for-hour trade where for every hour I listened to KISS or AC/DC, I was supposed to listen to an hour of easy listening or classical music). And he'd confiscate albums he thought were too raunchy, though they were all songs I heard regularly on the radio.

But music was also a bridge. When I got into jazz, his ecclectic collection provided me with some of my first jazz records. He didn't have much jazz, but he did have Gary Burton's 'Passengers,' which got me onto Pat Metheny as well as Burton. He bought me my first electric guitar, and when I turned out to be fairly serious about it, he sprung for a Skylark, a strange looking but quite playable solid-body J.C. Penny's sold. It had a through-neck, deep double cutaways to the 24th fret, a lot of the features that make Carvins a good buy in the solid-body arena. I saved my own money for the Gibson that replaced it, and the Yamaha Archtop that replaced the Gibson (see 'part two' of the history of Lobsterism and Kenny's Guitars for more on that.

Which brings us to one of the grandest gestures my Dad ever went to. When Kenny expressed an interest in turning his magnificent luthiering on a Benedetto type archtop for me, Dad picked up the materials bill, which is considerable, witness that I still haven't come up with the dough for the seven string sequel (not that I've mastered a six string). And Dad and I had a fun trip to Houston to pick it up and I got to know my Uncle a lot better in the process.


Houston, Christmas '02

And Dad and Kenny shed a ton of light on how their father and later stepfather was. And how Kenny's fatherhood experience was. And we all got to talk about the delights of heart disease, as Kenny and I are both heart attack survivors, and Dad had two angioplasties prior to the bypass he had a couple weeks after my heart attack.

Which brings up the biggest gift Dad gave me in many ways. Ten years ago, when I, to use addict lingo, hit rock bottom and decided to quit smoking cigarettes, Dad was key. I had no health insurance, and I was broke. He paid for me to see his doctor, because the patch wasn't over-the-counter yet. I think I may have bought the patches, but I'm not 100% sure Dad didn't give me the $40 or so the box of them cost.

The patch, by the way, only helped in a VERY indirect way. I'd just taken my wife to the ER twice in a weekend without insurance, so I had medical bills I couldn't imagine how to pay for. I think my take-home pay at the time was slightly over $200 a week. My wife made more, she'd just started at AT&T (which would eventually provide us the most spectacular health insurance we've ever had). And the patch, it came with these warnings about how it elevates your blood nicotine level, and you can have overdose induced seizures smoking while wearing them. Since I was a chainsmoker of unfiltered cigarettes, burning up 3-1/2 to 4-1/2 packs a day, the doctor had me on the highest dose patch for starters.

So fear of a third ER bill was really what kept me from lighting up. I came close, really close. I fished a butt out of an ashtray I hadn't gotten around to emptying on the third day. It was about 2/3 smoked, but there was three or four good drags to be had there. I had the butt in my mouth, the match lit.

Instead of lighting it, I called my Dad. Which I'd been doing a lot. I told him about how close I'd come, about how I almost blew 72 hours of withdrawal suffering. All those attempts I'd made to quit, I'd get six, eight, twelve hours along and I'd cave and it just resets the clock when you do, especially that early.

Dad was my AA meeting for cigarettes. He'd been off them for 20+ years, but he knew where I was at. He even told me how he sometimes still wanted one, but that he knew that having one would be the first step to a carton a week. He also told me how he had to learn to deal with each situation he smoked in one at a time. Which is how I ended up approaching it.

You learn to finish a meal without lighting up. Drive to work, that was three fags for me, I had to learn to commute without lighting up. A friend gave me a stage cigarette which looked and felt about right in the hand, had a piece of orange foil in the tip to make it look real, and that helped with the 'something to do with your hands' aspect, and something to suck on.

The fifth day, I forgot to change patches and I felt just like hell. Junk-sick, but here's the thing: no worse than I was the days before that. So I quit wearing the patches, didn't refill the prescription, but after coping with five days, I had too much misery invested to backslide.

'No way I'm going through this week again,' I told myself.

'I haven't had a cigarette in 112 hours,' I told my Dad. He told me I'd never make it if I counted the hours, and eventually I counted days, weeks, months. Now I have to think about it to be sure how many years it's been (ten). Not counting the experiment the other day, which really reinforced my quittedness. Or the rare time I have a cigar, which is not something I inhale off of, and definitely don't get any nicotine buzz from. And it's been over a year since I had one of those. This might not make sense to folks who've never smoked or whatever, but it just doesn't scratch the same itch. Back when I was a cigarette smoker, I'd finish a cigar absolutely craving a cigarette.

So anyway, without the help my Dad gave me on many levels, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gotten the cigarette monkey off my back. And when I had the heart attack, already seven years off the butts, I saw the stress of people in cardiac rehab with me. Trying to change our diets, get over the psychological barriers to taking he cardiac drugs (especially if you're young, the idea of taking Lipitor or Atenelol is hard to take). Trying to get into an excercise regime, all these adjustments are hard by themselves. But a guy even younger than me, who was only 27 in fact, he was having to kick cigarettes on top of all this. So were some of the older, more age-appropriate patients.

And even back in my teens, when my Dad and I struggled to maintain even detente, I just thought of something else he did for me:

After the divorce (which both my parents were extraordinarily civilized about), Dad rented a house for a while but of course went ahead and bought one. He made a point of making it close to my Mom's house so we wouldn't have a long travel. Made sure we each had a room of our own, so it'd be as much 'home' as the one we were used to calling 'home.' And the first one he picked out, it was a neat looking stone house, I'm sure he'd have liked it a lot better than the one he ended up buying. He had put his $1000 earnest money deposit on it, and drove my brother and me by it to show us. It was caddy-corner to the house of a guy who was one of a group at my grade school who'd ritually bullied me. To an extent that I transferred for junior high so I wouldn't start seventh grade with this clique. All I said, and I'd had a year of NOT having to put up with the guy, was 'There's So and So's house.'

I didn't say it as a plea, I'd alienated a whole new set of kids at the junior high I'd transfered to and I didn't really fear the guy anymore. I just noticed it, because I remembered it from the bus route. So Dad started questioning me about that, about whether I'd be able to hang loose with this kid across the street. He'd put $1000 of non-refundable money up, and while the 'underpaid teacher' is at least partially mythical, it was a ton of money to him.

I felt fairly resigned to it, as I recall. I think I may have said that I wouldn't have picked the spot on purpose but I could handle it. I do remember Dad said something about talking to the Realtor and seeing how firm they were about keeping the earnest money.

I don't know if my Dad fibbed for my sake, he let on like they gave him the money back. I think he'd decided it was worth a grand if it kept me from having to fight that kid and his crew. And maybe he'd also thought about how similar this guy was to some characters a few years older on my Mom's block who were responsible for most of the vandalism in our neighborhood.

I think my Dad tried to be a better father than he'd had, and from what I can tell, he was a better father than either my grandfather (who I never knew) or my Grandma's second husband, the only 'Grandpa' I ever knew. I know I've tried to be a better Dad, and maybe I've avoided some of the areas my Dad blew it, but I'm sure there's areas where I've just replaced one shortcoming for another.

And for all the ways I try to be different from my Dad, I call my kids Honyocks, just like he did. I'm at least as much of a packrat as he is, I don't even try to fight it anymore, I embrace my packratting. And while our politics are in many ways polar opposites, I'm tilting at windmills just like my Dad does. Or trying to talk them to death.

Yes, Dad is definitely where I got my love of stories, which has passed to yet another generation. He recorded my first story, 'The Three Turtles' on reel-to-reel when I was three or four. His library is still an enviable one, as he at one time fancied pursuing a PhD in English, and set about collecting the authors of note. And he'd picked up less 'important' books at the garage sales he was addictted to. It was a collection I raided at an early age, sometimes to my Dad's horror. He had the notion that Terry Southern's ribald comedy 'Candy,' Philip Dick's 'Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch' and some of my other selections might not be appropriate reading for a third grader. I did get in hot water in third grade for my oral book report of Peter Benchley's 'Jaws,' because I couldn't resist sharing the goriest details no matter how many times the teacher tried to warn me off.

Which reminds me of another story (will have to be the last, this has got to be the longest blog entry ever). When I turned 12, I asked for Dad to take me and a couple of friends to a movie. I'd picked 'Arthur,' which had gotten a PG rating, and after, my Dad launched into a fit of vituperation against the entire motion picture industry for the obscenity he'd not only witnessed but had exposed three sixth-graders to. I think he was afraid the parents of the other two would get on his case when they found out what we'd seen, but Dad didn't know their parents very well. The biker guy who was one of the father's in question could have taught sailers to swear, and the other father had a pornography stash so vast that an astonishing number of back issues filtered into the neighborhood (including most of the first few collections I got caught with) and the father never even noticed them missing. Or wouldn't admit enough to owning them to look further into it.

In any case, I remember well that Dad's rant included praise of the days when Kansas had a board that reviewed movies and gave them a thumbs up or down with regards to their obscenity. Yeah, Dad was pining for censorship, no kidding.

And 'Arthur' touched even more nerves though, because aside from the vulgar content, he thought it glamorized alcoholism and showed prostitution in a favorable light. But the biggest fault, I think was that the protagonist was rich on top of it all. Dad's socialist tendencies just revolt at a multi-millionaire as protagonist. I think if you removed every word that couldn't be said on television, removed the prostitution and alcoholism, I think Dad would still gladly build a gulag for anyone who makes a movie where an irresponsible and wealthy protagonist comes out on top is not obscene.