And Things Only Get Weirder

All right!  Yesterday’s little exercise has me on a roll.  Since Falling Dog initially tagged me….and then pointed out the conspicuous absence of Daddy dearest as one of my oddities….. I started to think about Daddy dearest and his charming little quirks.

SIX TWELVE WEIRD THINGS ABOUT MY FATHER

1.  NO ONE may touch the morning paper before he has read it cover to cover.  It may take him all day to finish it, but you better not touch it until he does, if you want to keep your head firmly attached to your neck.  The unread sections are on the floor at the left of his chair.  The read sections are on the floor at the right of his chair.  IF he is in an EXCEEDINGLY happy mood you MIGHT get to look at the sections he has already read.  But don’t bet on it.

2.  DO NOT, under any circumstances, place your hands on the outside of his car.  Yes.  I said outside.  You see, your hands have oil on them.  That ‘hand oil’ makes it extremely difficult to wash your grubby fingerprints off his shiny car.  No one that I have ever known in my life has ever even thought of touching any surface on the inside of his car, except for sitting in the seats.

3.  Words of wisdom I remember from my childhood:
     "If you get caught, don’t call home."
     "I don’t care where you are, if I want you, I’ll find you."
I’m sure there were other, saner, more loving words……it’s just that those two phrases are indelibly burned in my brain forever.  I believe he will enforce those edicts from beyond the grave.

4.  One brand name:  JB WELD.  Yep.  It’s his version of duct tape.  If it can’t be fixed with JB Weld, then it can’t be fixed.  He made a wonderful little box to hold the remote control for the TV in the bedroom I stay in at his house….and used JB Weld to stick it to the wall.  Eventually that house will be sold…..and someone is going to rip out an entire section of wall trying to remove that box from the wall.  When his dentist wasn’t available….he used JB Weld to mend his bridge.

5.  Are you familiar with the show "MONK"?  Daddy dearest makes Adrian Monk look tame when it comes to having everything in its place.  DO NOT – and I cannot stress it strongly enough – DO NOT move anything in his house unless you put it exactly where it goes.

6.  EXCEPTION TO ITEM FIVE:  small children and pets can do any damn thing they please and he will smile and clean it up.

7.  He is allergic to pork….except for bacon and ham.  Go figure.

8.  He measures the height of his grass to make sure his mower blade is set at the right height.

9.  He remembers movie dialoges and poems.  I grew up listening to him recite Ogden Nash Limericks and Rudyard Kipling poems and random lines from movies…. Consequently I can spew forth volumes of material which I have no idea of the origin.  "Less and less I am liking this Yakabovski".  or "My daughter looks just like me – oh boy is she ugly!"  Anybody know those movies?  argh!

10.  Eating out can only be done at restaurants that accept reservations because the man will NOT wait.  Well, that’s not exactly right.  He will wait, but everyone within a 20 mile radius will be miserable because he is waiting.

11.  He does not know how to purchase food at a fast food drive through window.  I asked him to get my daughter a chicken sandwich at Burger King once – and I had to go with him because he’d never done it before.  And guess what – he’s never done it since.

12.  DO NOT SURPRISE HIM.  When I gave my parents a surprise party for their 25th wedding anniversary….I had to tell them 2 days ahead of time because he would have not reacted well to an actual surprise. 

I’ll stop here.  I could go on…..and on……and on……..  but I’ve already doubled the "SIX" in six weird things.

Lest you think I am being critical…I love my dad and all his quirks.  Sometimes they make my life hell.  And sometimes all you can do is laugh.  Still, perhaps his biggest quirk is that he loves me – and my children – very much.