After the last few days of feeling down because of what has been happening here, I decided that today I would try and think of some funny memories to share. It is interesting, but the only memories I could think of were about things to do with my dad.
Ever since I can remember, my dad has sort of marched to the beat of his own drummer. Even in stories he has told me about his younger days he did his own thing. In one story he told me, he talked about how he and his cousin (I think) bought a car for $50, drove across country (starting in Kentucky), got to Texas and joined the Air Force. His favorite college football team to watch is Kentucky. Every year he tell us how good he thinks they will do during football season. He had us watch so much three stooges on TV when we were growing up, that I can believe there is some educational value in Larry’s eye poke.
The whole time I was growing up my dad always worked a lot. Several times, he would work in one state and we would live in another and often we only saw in on the weekends. It was important to him that his family was taken care of so he worked very hard, and still does. With the type of work he did, he had to travel quite a bit, and many times we were able to go with him. Thanks to him I have had the opportunity to see many countries in the world and many places in the United States.
All that traveling did require us to go to many places that we were not familiar with. Dad always made sure that we had maps. The thing was though, I cannot recall dad actually using those maps very often or even asking for directions. So it was a common occurrence for us to end up in unexpected places. Dad always refused to say we were lost. He would say we were “sight seeing”. I remember going sight seeing a whole lot when I was a kid.
One of my most vivid memories of when we lived in Spain, was the summer my cousin came to visit. My parents thought it would be good for all of us to visit several different countries. I am not sure why, maybe it was cheaper than staying in hotels, or he thought it would be more fun for us kids, but my dad decided it would be a good idea for us to borrow someone’s tent and camp in the various countries we were visiting. I do not recall any problems with our camping trip until we got to Germany. One of my parents had made sure that everyone had air mattresses to sleep on. Which turned out to be a good thing. When we got to the camp ground in Germany, and after we had the tent all set up, it began to rain. A very heavy rain. A very, very heavy rain. When we woke up the next morning, our air mattresses were floating in the rain water that had collected in our tent. That is when I got to find out what a hostel was like.
We continued making our way through different parts of Europe, heading toward Switzerland, where my cousin would catch his plane back to the States.
After we dropped my cousin off at the airport in Switzerland, it was time for us to start heading back to where we lived in Spain. It seems my dad was supposed to make hotel reservations for us in France, around the area of the French Riviera, but for whatever reason it did not happen. We still got to spend the night on the French Riviera….in the car.
During the time that my Dad’s job allowed us to live in Spain, I got see real castles, meet bull fighters, and see famous artwork. I will always remember what my dad said about Rodin’s famous sculpture The Thinker. It is describe as depicting “a man in somber meditation, battling with a powerful inner struggle”. My dad’s description was much shorter. He said it looked like a man “sitting on the toilet”.
After we moved back to the States, we lived in Marietta, Georgia. We actually lived there for several years. Dad would work a lot like he had always done, and often we just saw him on the weekends. As my brother and I hit our teen years, it became important to dad for us to do things as a family now and then. One of his favorite things to do was to get up on a Sunday morning and tell us we had about 15 minutes to get ready, and then we would be leaving to have breakfast at some little diner he had found. The problem with only giving us 15 minutes was that we lived in the 80’s. The era of big hair and loads of make up. There was no way I could get my fine, straight hair to be big, in that amount of time. Since I was a teenager at the time, there was no way I was willing to walk out of the house without my big hair and make up on. My dad was a brave man to risk the temper of a teen aged girl so that he could make sure that at least once in a while the whole family was together.
Despite my insistence on achieving the appropriate sized hair, I think dad insisting that we all go have breakfast together as a family turned out to be a good thing. I look back on those breakfasts and think that it is very nice that I have memories of all of us being together and enjoying each other’s company.
My dad is a hero. I mean a real life hero. Once when we were all snorkeling I accidentally caused a major panic in the family by screaming into my snorkel. I screamed because there were all these sting rays on the bottom of the ocean, underneath the boat we needed to get on. I have a fear of scuba diving where I cannot see the bottom of where I am diving. So my panic was more about the fact that the sting rays were covering the bottom of where I needed to swim than it was about the sting rays. That did not change the fact though that my screaming into my snorkel caused my mother, brother and myself to all jump on my dad’s back at the same time. Unfortunately for dad, this meant he was on the bottom of the pile, in the ocean. He was great though. Somehow he managed to keep from drowning with all of us on his back and got us to calm down so we would remove ourselves from our place in the pile.
After I had my son, and I was going to college, there were times when my dad had to babysit. He was awesome at it. He always insisted that he would not change diapers, but I know he changed a stinky diaper on more than one occasion. If my son was in his crib sleeping, my dad had an odd but effective way of checking on him. He would shake the crib a bit until my son moved and then my dad would know everything was OK.
As he has gotten older, dad has developed his own unique clothing style. He is a trend setter in the grandparent set. Many of his generation attempt to mimic his clothing style. I like to call the style “Parental Revenge”. His style consists of black shoes with white socks, baggy shorts that come down to his knees, a pair of suspenders, a button up shirt, and sometimes a fanny pack . I have no proof but I suspect he makes a point of wearing this outfit around me and my brother because he knows it slightly embarrasses us. It is his his way of making up for all the times we embarrassed him in public when we were kids.
Without his meaning to my dad has given me so many good memories. Memories that make me smile. I am thankful for that. They will be something that I will always cherish. I feel blessed that my dad is still around to add to my memory collection.
What are some of your favorite memories?
