Father's Day Thoughts

Last Sunday was Father’s Day and I desperately wanted to pull out something from my younger days to share with everybody. However, I couldn’t find anything that I wrote as a kid for Father’s Day. I guess that when I was a kid we didn’t do stuff like that for our Dads. It was definitely a different time. Let’s face it, back then most of our fathers were not very engaged with us and our lives. It was mostly the mothers that raised the kids and Dad was only brought in when the heavy artillery was needed. Still, I was hoping to find something.

Then I thought about a poem I wrote for my Dad for Father’s Day a couple of years before he passed away. I looked high and low, and couldn’t find a printed copy. I looked on old 3.5 inch floppy disks (yeah, I still have a few of them) and came up empty. I looked in the attic in some storage boxes and it was not to be found. So, I have nothing to share with you about Father’s Day from when I was kid. However, I can share some things I always think of when I think of my Dad:

•  I always knew when Dad was coming home because I could hear him whistling as he came up the walkway. I don’t know the songs he was whistling, but I’m sure they were classics from his life. That is something that was not passed down to my kids; I can’t imagine going around whistling Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen, or even the Beatles.
• Whenever we sang “Let There Be Peace on Earth” at church, it brought tears to Dad’s eyes. When you’ve been in a war and seen things that you just don’t talk about, I guess singing about peace has a little more meaning to you. My son is in chorus at school and when they sang it for a show I, too, had tears in my eyes thinking of my Dad.
• On Sundays, Dad always made breakfast for us – bacon, eggs and toast. It was awesome to wake up after a nice, long, fun Saturday and smell the bacon cooking in the kitchen. Even if most times he overcooked it (unless you like it dry and rock hard), it was awesome to not have to make it myself.
• On Sunday afternoons, Dad always made hamburgers for lunch. He didn’t make little, scrawny, slider-like burgers; he made big, beefy burgers that took two hands to eat. The Burger King Whopper had nothing on Dad’s burgers!
• On Saturday afternoon, Dad would watch Candlepin Bowling, a local bowling show. He really got into it, and when a pin was wobbling he would yell “Get over!”  I tried that once when I was bowling and the people in the next lane did NOT appreciate it.
• Even though we weren’t very well off when I was a kid, my Dad was always willing to serve others and help wherever he could. When he tried to refuse a Thanksgiving turkey one year, we were all a little ticked off. However, now that I’m older I get it – there’s always someone who is in greater need than you and he thought someone else should have gotten it.
• When I wanted to learn how to play Cribbage, Dad patiently taught me, even when I made the same mistakes over and over. He took the time to explain what I could have done that would have been better. I, however, did not have that same patience when my kids were kicking my butt playing Trouble.

Maybe someday I will find a copy of that poem I wrote for my Dad. Even if I don’t, I still have a lot of great memories of him and the many things he taught us growing up. I hope that my kids have fond memories of me when I’m gone. I’m sure they’ll tell their kids how they kicked my butt playing…well, just about every game we played. I also hope they'll remember the good things I taught them.

I Got the Music In Me

I went to take a shower late Saturday afternoon and saw that my son had left an iPod dock in the bathroom. So I grabbed my iPod, plugged it in and cranked some tunes while I was taking a shower. I haven’t listened to music while in the shower in years and it made me feel happy and kind of like a kid again. Afterwards, I felt a little silly for getting a bit giddy from just listening to music while taking a shower and it sounds kind of stupid now that I’m writing it down, but music holds many memories for me.

A song can sometimes bring me right back to a place I was when I heard it the first time, or when something important happened in my life. Sometimes a song will simply remind me of a time when I was feeling down and it changed my mood or made me feel better. And yes, there are even songs that kind of bum me out a bit as I mentioned here. But I remember cranking up the tunes before I went out on a Saturday night, setting the mood for my evening. That’s what I was remembering while in the shower and it made me smile.

I’ve always loved music, even if I couldn’t play it. A few of my brothers played the drums, but I figured out fairly quick that I was not a drummer. I always liked the bass and the guitar, but I never was able to get one. I hung around with a few guys who played guitar and I’d pick it up some times, but I didn’t spend enough time on it. One friend taught me to play the first three notes of “Smoke on the Water”! That’s right, three notes was the extent of my guitar playing. 

Hopefully, it doesn’t seem from my other posts that my older siblings always gave me a hard time, because they didn’t. They actually taught me about a lot of good things growing up, especially music. I got to listen to a lot of good music when I was a kid, courtesy of my older brothers and sisters. We had just about all the Beatles albums, early Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Grand Funk Railroad and a lot of others, too. I still remember the first record I bought; the single “Victoria” by The Kinks. I was definitely influenced by what they listened to. When I got to be a little older, like early teens, I wore out Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin II, The Who’s Tommy and Chicago’s Chicago Transit Authority. We had what I consider to be some of the best music of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. I still listen to a lot of classic rock today.

Today, I still want to learn how to play guitar. In the meantime I can listen to my kids, who are both incredible musicians and singers, and my wife who is an incredible singer, too. Or, I could just crank some classic rock tunes on my iPod. Even if it’s not Saturday night.

Take All You Want, But Eat All You Take

First in an occasional series on Famous Family Sayings

I’ve noticed lately that I don’t each as much as I used to. Maybe it’s because I subconsciously hear some of the words from the Pink Floyd song “Dogs”: And it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around. Or maybe it’s because things just don’t taste the same to me anymore. A lot of food just tastes bland to me. Can you lose taste buds as you get older? I don’t know, but it seems like I am. The other night we had something with dinner and my wife and son both said it tasted very salty. However, to me it didn’t taste salty at all. Not a bit, which is kind of scary.

Or maybe it’s because as a kid I had it drilled into my head to “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” That was a phrase we heard a lot at my house growing up. My parents hated to waste food. Heck, when you’re paying as much as they did for food every week for nine kids, you don’t want to be throwing it away. So they had a rule: you can take as much food as you wanted, but you had to eat it all. If you asked how much spaghetti you could take, the answer was “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” If you asked if you could have two burgers, the answer was “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” If you asked how many cookies you could have, the answer was “Three.” As much as we tried, the cookie answer was never “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” Nor was it for M&M’s, brownies or ice cream. It was for liver and onions, but we never took Mom and Dad up on that one. 

Seems pretty simple, but in the competitive world of dinner time in a large family it wasn’t as cut and dry as you’d think. If you took only a small amount of food to make sure you could eat it all, when you went back for more there might not be any left. Mom usually made enough for everyone plus a little more, but there were times there was just enough for everybody. If you went conservative, someone else could take the rest of what you should have taken the first time. If you took a large portion to make sure you got your share and couldn’t finish it, somehow Dad always knew. Even if you tried to cover it up or rush past him to get the dishes to the sink, he knew. On those occasions you’d get the corollary to “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” That is, “Your eyes were bigger than your stomach.”

When one of my parents said it, I would always picture my face with these huge eyes that took up my whole face, alien like. Knowing my younger self, I probably went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, just to make sure I didn’t have crazy eyes. We didn’t get punished for taking too much; Dad just let us know that it was not alright. There was something about disappointing him that made me not take too much. Which is why if “Your eyes were bigger than your stomach.” was a sarcastic comment from one of my siblings, it was like rubbing salt in the wound. I not only felt like I disappointed my parents, I had to take a ribbing on top of it.

As for eating today I take all I want, but I do eat all I take. Like my parents, I don’t like to waste food either. Food costs way too much today to throw it away. Besides, every time I look in the mirror these days, I can see that there’s absolutely no possible way that my eyes could be bigger than my stomach.