My father and I get along great.  Growing up he was a loving and giving dad, and we had lots of great times together.  In my adulthood, we continue to chat often.

All this being said, my Father is also a guy who doesn’t always have his priorities in check.  The day I announced that my wife and I were expecting our first child was a great example.

As a bit of backstory, you should know that, due to some medical complications, we had no luck getting pregnant “the old fashioned way.”  So when that didn’t work we tried sex.  Still no luck, but we kept at it… for 9 years.  We had also been married a total of 12 years.  So it had been a long period of no grandkids for my father.  When I got my current job, I was fortunate enough to get some medical assistance with in vitro fertilization (IVF), and it was a crazy process.

My portion of it was easy, as I simply had to give a sample of my swimmers, but my wife had to be subjected to a minimum of 3 shots a day, in both her belly and her hip.

During this process, I kept in constant contact with family members, including my father, and provided updates on where we were in the process.

So just to sum up: 9 years of trying, followed by countless needles jammed into my wife, and an insane amount of stress, but in the end it worked!  We were expecting our first child.  It was an amazing moment, and I couldn’t wait to share it with everyone, including my dad.

I called him on the phone, and the conversation went EXACTLY like this:

“Hey, Dad!”

“Hi, bud.  How are you?”

“Good!  I’ve got some great news!”

“What’s that?”

“Tessa and I are expecting! The IVF worked and she’s pregnant!”

“Alright!  That’s great news.  Say, did you hear that Ron from across the street has to turn his pick-up in on the Lemon Law?”

“Dad, I feel like you sort of blew right past the news about us expecting.”

“Nah… that’s great news, Davey, but Ron has only had that pick-up for a month and it’s been in the shop 3 times already.”

I knew my Dad was excited in his own way, even if he happened to be just a bit more excited about the news of Ron from across the street turning in his month-old Nissan on the Lemon Law.

My son is now a couple of weeks away from turning 4, and my dad couldn’t be happier to be a grandfather.  Not only that, but Ron from across the street hasn’t had any problems with his replacement pickup and is still driving it to this day.

I know this because my dad updates me on it every time I take my son to his house for a visit.

When it came time for me and my wife to pick out names for our unborn children, we toiled over each one as any good parent should.  My rules were simply that the name couldn’t rhyme with something derogatory (Icky Ricky, Smelly Kelly, Flaccid… uh… Hermaccid, etc.), couldn’t also describe a body part (Dick, Peter, Vulva, etc.), and above all else couldn’t join with my phallic last name to create some type of uber locker-stuffing combination (Harry Johnson, Tanner Johnson, Sandy Johnson, etc.).

I almost let one slip past me as we had decided on the name Sawyer for my Son (yes, “Lost” was big at the time), and right at the last minute, I realized that this would make my Son “Saw Yer Johnson.”  Crisis narrowly averted.

I went to school in a very small town, and I saw what hell a poorly named child could be subjected to.  Don Keys was a laughing stock, Rusty Steele an outcast, and Dollar Bill Smith (we called him “Buck” for short) was often found huddled in a ball on the floor of the bathroom, letting his tears run down the floor drain.

(I only wish those names were fictitious, as do the kids involved.)

So instead we went with Sebastian for my Son, and a few years later we went with Lily for my Daughter.  Yes, “Silly Lily” is a possibility, but frankly I hope my Daughter is a little on the silly side, just like her old man.

“I’m doing alright, but I’m a little bitchy.”

Those were the words I heard uttered by the woman behind the counter at my local mini-mart this morning.  I fuel up at this same mini-mart at least once a week, and I do this not for the charming woman behind the counter, but instead because my next door neighbor happens to own it, is a good man, and I like to support him when I can.

The 300lb, heavily-tattooed, bleach-blonde woman behind the counter just happens to be the icing on the cake for me, because I love angry people, and I love trying to “turn them.”  If I work with a perpetual rain cloud, I take great pride at being the guy who chips away their hard shell of rage and finds the sweet candy middle.  In fact, I sort of make it a mission at times.  At a previous company I worked for, the woman in accounts payable was a real pitbull, and everyone called her things that you shouldn’t call women unless they just cut you off in traffic, and you haven’t had caffeine yet, and you didn’t get much sleep because your 4-year-old has a cold, and you… WHY DON’T YOU TRY USING A SIGNAL, YOU STUPID…

Wait… where was I?

Oh right.  So this woman was not well-liked in the office, but each day I’d chip away at her.  “Hello, Linda.  You look nice today.”  “Well good morning, Linda!  I see you have your attack face on.  Haha… go get em’!”  “Linda, I actually don’t think she can breathe.  You’d better get off of her.”  It took months, but eventually I wore her down to the point where she dropped her tough exterior and wound up being nice to me and only me.  She even started to let me in on her secrets like, “Now watch as I really turn on the rage to Carl.  His account hasn’t paid in 6 weeks, and he’ll wilt like a flower.”  I got some kind of strange pleasure out of it, as I’d watch this woman then pounce on poor Carl like some kind of rabies-infested tree squirrel.

So the woman at the mini-mart is no exception.  She is angry, bitter, loud, crass, and I desperately want her to accept me.  So I’ve spent the last 6 months working on her each time I fill up for my daily commute to work, and I’ve made serious progress.  So much so that after she looked at the stunned patron across the counter, who had no idea that casually asking, “How are you doing today?” would warrant a response such as, “I’m doing alright, but I’m a little bitchy,” she then turned and winked at me.

“Why are you a little bitchy, Carol?” I asked in as monotone a way as possible.  With someone like this, you never want to display any signs of fear.

“Well, I was supposed to leave for Hawaii tomorrow, but then my husband went and got a stupid job,” she replied with a snort as she bit the head off of a bottle of beer and drank the contents.  Now don’t be alarmed that she was drinking beer at 8:00am in the morning, as I should mention that it was probably only her 7^th or 8^th, and nothing terribly out of control.

“That son of a bitch,” I responded.

She laughed and said, “I know!  He’s been laid off for 18 years, and gets a job two weeks before we’re supposed to leave for Hawaii.  Probably for the best though, since they drug test at his new job, so we wouldn’t have been able to have a good time anyway.”

I probably wouldn’t have been able to hide my reaction to the fact that her husband had been laid off for the past 18 years, had it not been for the fact that I could not stop my stupid brain from immediately conjuring up images of this woman in a bikini on a beach in Hawaii.  To give you an idea of what this would look like; picture 70s all-pro Linebacker, Dick Butkus, in his prime, in a bikini, lounging on a beach, only with slightly more facial hair.

So there lies the double-edged sword of trying to be a friend to Oscar the Grouch:  Sometimes you get to live vicariously through them as they pounce on helpless prey…

Other times you just get to picture Dick Butkus in a bikini.

There was this old house around 40 feet from the chain-link fence that surrounded my elementary school.  In retrospect, it was just another crappy, run-down house in my crappy, run-down hometown.  However to the kids in the 5^th grade, it had taken on a life of its own, and had become… HAUNTED.

There were many stories around this house like that kids had died there, skeletons hung in the closets on coat hangers, blood stains could be seen on the windows, and countless other yarns that children find quite troubling yet feed on in some sadistic way.

By the time it was my 5^th grade class’s turn to have the legend passed to us, it had morphed into something quite simple:  If you looked into the upstairs window at the worn out dresser, and you stared hard enough and long enough, you’d see the drawers move on their own!

Looking back on things, I think what was really being handed down from class to class was a punishment in the same way hazing works, in that the older kids did it to the younger simply because it had been done to them.  Sometime towards the end of the year, when a kid had spent an entire year staring at the house, and hadn’t seen a single bloody handprint or dead kid waving from the basement, they would realize they had been duped.  To make up for this, they would then construct a story of their own to waste a year’s worth of recesses for the following class.

So we got the drawers.  Those damn drawers.  It was really just one drawer, and it was probably some hard working, blue collar father’s underpants drawer who probably would have been more than a little creeped out himself to know that an entire classroom of kids was staring at the drawer that housed his… well… drawers.

Yet there we were, every day, staring into that stupid window at that stupid drawer.  The weak kids peeled off one by one, turning their attention to the swings or the slide, but not me.  Oh no, I was going to see that stinking drawer move if it took every second of every recess of the entire school year.

Well I’ve built this up enough, so the big reveal is that I never saw the dumb thing move.  Not even an inch.  I have no idea what I would have done if I had seen it move, but I was sure pissed off when it didn’t.  I realized that I too had been tricked.  The blood-stained torch had been passed, and I fell for it rusty hook in the door, line and sinker.

So I dedicated the entire summer to shaping the legend I would hand down to the upcoming class.  I wound up telling a kid that a daughter of the family that lived in the house had been buried alive in the front yard, and if you watched long enough in one spot, you’d see the ground move.

Then I spent the entire year taking great pride in seeing him and all of his little 5^th Grade buddies hanging out at the fence and staring at that spot of ground.

What a bunch of rubes.