Father Dearest

Introduction

Any detached observer might have thought my father to be a very laconic man.  Indeed, he was rather a recluse, and never to my knowledge willingly sought society.  He entered sweepstakes but feared that if ever he won, the prize-givers would bring T.V. cameras to his very doorstep and expect him to act like a fool for the amusement of thousands of commercial viewers. My brother once asked him why he didn’t buy a car phone, and he responded, “Why would I? I can’t stand people calling me at home, much less when I’m in my car!” (This was in the days before cell phones, when the cumbersome car phone was the modern rage.)

Yet something in the qualities of a recluse makes for an excellent father.  Perhaps it is that a man with no friends must at length be driven to share his hopes and his views with his family. Long discussions highlighted my journey from childhood to maturity. My father, brother, and I once talked for four hours about the meaning of art and whether or not hell was eternal. My father never lectured me, but I learned his morals through these discussions.  He rarely forbade me to do anything, yet it was always my instinct to please him. He rarely refused me anything, and so I asked him for nothing he could not easily afford. My father was a dedicated family man. Yet it must be confessed that my father never hesitated to occasionally taunt the members of his family unit…

When my mother first met my father, it was in high school during a party. He was asleep on a couch the whole time. So instantly she knew he was a true charmer. He had a gift for flattery, a gift that did not dissipated in their many years of marriage. In fact, some years ago, my mother asked him how he thought a pair of earrings would look with the outfit she was wearing. In his debonair manner he replied, “What, that peasant outfit? That Iranian revolutionary garb? What is that, a nurse’s smock?”

My father’s affection was not just limited to his family members. He had a special fondness for our late cat, Smokey. He loved to spend quality time playing with her. His favorite phrase in conjunction with Smokey was “watch what she does when I throw this at her.”

My father had a great deal of generosity where his family was concerned. When my brother graduated from high school, my father let him have one of the cars. We were all driving home in it one day when my brother made a left turn. The steering wheel let out a loud squeaking sound. My brother turned questioning eyes to my dad. “Do you like that?” my father asked him. “I had that feature especially installed for you so that you would know when you are turning your steering wheel too far to the left.”

His generosity extended to his wife as well, of course. My mother wanted a new stove last Christmas. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll be glad to get you a new stove—any kind you want. Just tell me when you want to go to the store with me and pick it out.” Later he told me that he would never have to buy it for her because she would never pick it out. My father did all of the grocery shopping, and confessed that my mother hadn't "set foot in a store" since they got married, “except for those few times when it was entirely unavoidable.”

Although my father was a recluse, when it came to family, he had few vocal reservations. If the detached observer could see him in conversations at home, my father would appear a very different man. When he was with people he knew well, he quite simply loved to talk. But perhaps talk is not the proper word. It fails to utilize the subtle nuances of the English vocabulary. I think, rather, my father was a man who loved to inform.

The accumulation of information was a life-long crusade for my father. He probably read the Bible at least five times, made his way well into the Random House Oxford Unabridged Dictionary, and reached Volume 14 of the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias. I once caught him murmuring something in French, a language which he has never studied, and when I asked him what he was doing, he responded, “I didn’t realize this book would be written in French.” Nonetheless, he went right on reading it.

It was unwise to ask my father questions, especially those not requiring an answer. Unfortunately, my father had yet to reach the r’s in the Unabridged, and consequently he did not know the meaning of the word rhetorical. He also found it utterly impossible to answer any question with a single word like “yes” or “no.” My friend once made the mistake of asking him what road we were on as he drove us to the movies. He answered with the name of the street, but also explained who it was named after, when and where the man was born, what notable deeds he had rendered, and where his final resting place lay. Then he went on to say that several other roads in the area were named after dead men too, and of course he gave extensive examples to support his claim.

Asking questions you didn’t want answered was a dangerous step, but when you argued with my father, you were treading on quicksand. If argument were an art, my father would be Rembrandt. It mattered not how much you thought you knew when you first got involved in an argument with him—it didn’t matter if you majored in the subject you were discussing, if you had a master’s degree in it, or if you’d been studying it for twenty years. My father would have some information to defend his position which you never dreamed could have existed—and he would share it with you in such a way to throw you completely off-guard. My father would then seize those precious seconds of confusion created by his unexpected thrust of information and use them to reformulate your entire argument so that it was in direct opposition to the facts he had acquired, even if it wasn’t what you were arguing in the first place. You see, it would not matter what the argument was about when you began. Once my father began to push you down that track, you could end up arguing something completely unrelated to your own beliefs. When you finally realized that you didn’t believe what you yourself are saying, it would be too late.

So there were two rules for dealing with my father, one about asking questions, and another forbidding argument. But there was a third and more important rule: never believe a word he said. If my father did not know an answer to a question, he would fabricate one, and his explanations were so detailed, so realistic, and so sincerely announced that it was impossible not to believe them. Usually there was little harm in such amusements…only once did my mother mistakenly teach all six of her English classes my father’s illusionary story about the origin of a certain word. I don’t recall the details, but I keenly remember my father glancing up from his book and slowly saying, “You didn’t.”

“Yes,” answered my mother, “I explained the origin to them.”

“Well,” my father said, “you do realize that I made that up, don’t you?”

A similar deception occurred as we were searching for Davy Crockett’s cabin. At last, we came across a historical marker about someone with a name resembling David Zimmerman. “That’s no help,” my mother said.

“Well you know,” said my father, “David Zimmerman was Davy Crockett’s real name. He changed it because at the time society was very anti-Semitic and he wanted to forge a name for himself on the frontier.”

“Maybe we ought to go that way then,” my mom suggested.

“We probably shouldn’t,” said my father, “considering I just made that up.”

We finally did find Davy Crockett’s cabin. It had been torn down and was being rebuilt to appeal to tourists.  The only thing that remained was a circle of cobblestones around the area where the cabin once stood, each bearing the name of a state. My father made us walk around those cobblestones for forty-five minutes. When I complained that the tour was slightly dull, he told me that I had absolutely no sense of history.

Oh, there’s one more rule I forgot to mention, and this is probably the most vital, though I forgot it time and time again: if you have any confidence in your intellectual abilities, any personal pride, any self-respect whatsoever, then never—I repeat, never—challenge my father to a game of Trivial Pursuit.