Happy Birthday Dad

I often wonder what my kids would have called my dad if he were still alive.  Today would have been his 66th birthday and the boys call my mom “Nanny” and they call Boy Genius’s parents “Me-Me” and “Pe-Paw”.  My husband called his grandfather “Paw” and I call mine “Paw-Paw” and “Grampa RC” and “Mamaw” and “Papaw”.

I wanted my kids to call my mother “grammy” but she would have nothing of it.  I liked it.  Now, they call her “ninnnnnnie” most of the time and it drives her nuts.  I think Grammy would have been a much better name.  I try to think of names that you can use when you aren’t a kid any longer and other kids won’t make fun of you for what you call your grandparents.

So, I don’t know what they would have called him, but I figure something along the lines of “Pop” or “Poppy” but I”m just guessing.  I quit writing posts about my father on his birthday several years ago when it just got so hard.  However, this year, I asked for some folks to help me have a Twitter Birthday Party in his honor and there were only a few of us but we had a good time. 

So, it make me think, let me tell you about some of his quirky habits…..that are really really different in my opinion than most.  Here’s a few:

1.  He had OCD and in some ways, it manifested itself much like my own.   I count things, he was an accountant…hummmmm

2.  He and my mom divorced when I was 4, he died when I was 19.  In those 15 years, he kept every check that the bank returned after they cleared (yes, I am old as dirt and that was the norm back then). 

3.  He had those checks in boxes, in numerical order.  He then had the outsides of the boxes labeled with the check numbers in the box, for example 2025 – 3000 and dates on them, like 1/3/1978 thru 5/7/1978. 

4.  He smoked.  He quit a few times, would gain up to almost 130 pounds and yes you read that correctly, 100 and 30 pounds and then return to smoking. 

5.  He was good with teenagers.  We had some weird rules but they worked for us and they’ve made me a better person.  Here’s two:

1.  I was allowed one pair of shoes in the living room by the door.  If I was not home, then there should be no shoes there.  If I was home, there should only be one pair.  All others had to be in my room.  My room which was one big disaster but at least, the family room was not a shoe haven.  Having more than one pair of shoes in the family room was grounds for one pair being hidden and thus finding a way to earn them back from where ever it was he could find to hide them.  It was fun, lessons taught, lessons learned and good times had.

2.  I was 13 when I went to live with him.  Up until that time, I had never lifted a finger to clean or do laundry.  He started my stay out by saying, “you can do food, wash dishes and keep the kitchen clean or you can do laundry and keep the toilet, tub and sink and counter tops clean”.  I often chose the latter. 

While I”m here, I thought of a couple of others.

3.  His laundry was delicate.  He taught school.  He wore polyester pants and white long sleeved button down shirts.  When his laundry was done, each item was to be removed from the dryer, still warm, the pants were to be creased with your hand as if you would do if you were ironing them and then hung on pants hangers.  His shirts, they were removed warm, the sleeves were creased with your hands just the same and hung on paper shirt hangers with the top button done so they didn’t fall off. Socks were never to be rolled.  They were to be mated and then folded in half.  I did laundry over a few times simply because I didn’t do it right the first time.

Are you starting to see where my OCD tendencies came from and especially those that deal with laundry?

4.  He had plants.  Like, gobs and gobs of plants.  And, he would go on trips (educational trips mostly but pleasure sometimes too) and leave me at home alone.  From the age of 14 up, I was left at home, alone with a car and keys to get me directly to band practice and back and/or softball/volleyball practice and back.  No where else.  And that’s what I did…no kidding, talk about trust???

5.  My job when he was gone was to water his 543,275,247,892 plants.  I never watered them.  Never.  Not one.  Rebel I was!  However, my friends would water them and I would always brag  sometime around Christmas about how I didn’t water his plants the whole 2 weeks he was gone in the summer.  Only bragging after I realized the plants had lived to tell about it.

6.  His rule regarding my car and gasoline was that he had a half of a tank of gas in the car. And, no matter when he got in my car (we had two after I turned 16 just because I didn’t go to school where he taught and his chauferring skills weren’t very good), my car was to always have his half of a tank of gas in it.  The rule was the rule.

7.  Another rule along the same lines, never leave home without shoes.  But the summer after I graduated high school, I went through this hippy phase, no shoes, ragged clothes, messy ponytails and sometimes even only pool dipped hair that didn’t get a real shampoo.  I showed up at my 7:30 class that summer looking worse than most folks do when they have run a marathon or something.   So, the rule was, even if I wasn’t going to wear shoes, I had to take the shoes with me when I left home.

8.  And, then it happened.  It was over 100 degrees out, I had no shoes on my feet nor did I have shoes in my car and I had used “his” half a tank of gas.  I walked on 100 degree hot blacktop pavement about 1/4 of a mile to a store to call him.  And, I had the nerve to ask him to bring me some shoes when he came.  And, being a good father, he did.  He brought me a gas can first though.  I pumped the gas into the can and he made me walk back to my car, then he gave me my shoes.  Lesson learned!

9.  Once when two buddies with very strict parents spent the night, they wanted to go rolling yards.  They wanted to sneak out.  I wouldn’t do it.  It was like 2 AM, they were begging me to just sneak out.  I explained that there was no way I was risking getting in trouble over that.  So, I woke him up, I knocked on his door and said, “It’s 2 AM, we are going to go roll so and so’s yard (like toilet paper roll) and we will be back by 3:15.  He looked at the clock, mumbled ok and be careful and off we went.  My buddies were in shock.

Last one of these and then I”m closing on an OCD note:

10.  Although I had been a model kid, I had chosen one morning to go into school late.  I don’t even remember why now and I remember even less about why I would have lied about it.  Either way, knowing that taking my keys all together meant he would have to return to the human chauffer, so instead…oh this was the worst..instead, I had to be home by 7:30 on weeknights and 9:00 pm on Friday and Saturday nights.  That was the worst.  I could lie and play sick or say I was going to spend the weekend with my grandmother if he had just grounded me totally.  But, going out on the weekends, and then having to be home by 9 pm, just as the movies let out and the fun started?  For four weeks, it was miserable!

And one more story before the OCD closing.  My father kidnapped me when I was 4.  He and my mom were battling out the divorce and she was trying to keep him from seeing me at all.  So, he pulled up in the sitters yard, in the middle of the summer and I got in.  I still remember the exact store where we stopped and bought me some shoes.  I was shoeless and dirty with no extra clothes.

But, the final OCD story.  In 1987, July to be exact, he was given about 3 months to live.  Sometime in the spring of 1988 (I don’t know exactly because the person who told me this didn’t remember), he took all the loan papers, car loans, bank loans, credit card stuff, life insurance policies, the whole nine yards and he wrote a note on each one explaining what it was.  They would read like this, “This is a life insurance policy, call John X at 205-abc-efgh and give him the acct number 456789 and let him handle it” and then he would sign and date for the first day of that month. 

He did that every month from sometime in the spring of 1988 til August of 1988.  He would spend hours upon hours telling me, “If something happens to me….blah blah blah” and I would tune him out because I had no intention of that happening.  But, when he died, the notes were all there, dated August 1, 1988, signed and he died on August 22, 1988.  And, I recalled almost everything he had told me.

And, he was in the hospital when he died.  He had me bring him a notebook the night before he died, which was a Sunday.  He was suppose to be released on Monday.  He called me early Monday morning to come to the hospital and get him because he was being discharged.  When I got to the hospital, he had died.  The only page missing out of the notebook I had brought him was a piece where he had written down his funeral arrangements.  He had explicitly said, “I am not to be embalmed, I am to be carried to XYZ funeral home, there will be no service, I am to be buried at ABC cemetery right beside Grandmother so and so at 11 AM the next day.  There is to be no ceremony in either place.?

That simple.  That organized.  That wonderful!

Happy Birthday Poppy!  I think that would have fit just right!