Throughout the time I have shared with you the ins and
outs of living with my Daddy, I haven’t done a whole lot of reminiscing about
the more interesting perks of having a good ol’ boy for a Daddy.
I recently spent a week in Hawaii with my family,
which now includes my niece’s boyfriend who is saddled with the unfortunate
nickname ‘Rica’.
This very nice young man’s parents named him
Chad. My sister started calling him
Chad-rica, for reasons known only to her.
And as she is prone to do, she shortened it to simply Rica and refers to
him by that moniker in all our conversations.
So, I have started calling him Rica in my head; for example, when I was
making my Christmas list I actually wrote “shirt for Rica”. My Daddy even calls him Rica and thought he was
Hispanic, which made for an odd conversation when they arrived at my house this
June and in walked a blonde boy.
My Daddy ever so eloquently stated, “I ain’t never
seen a blonde-headed messican. Are you
sure that’s Rica?” When I attempted to
make light of the situation (due to the reddening face of Rica himself) by
stating that Castilian Spaniards can be blonde, my Daddy flagged down that
train with his usual bluster, “Casteeya-whatayasay? There ain’t no such thing as a blonde-headed
messican.”
And I shared all that to say this – I returned from my
trip on Wednesday night, Thanksgiving Eve, if you will, and reminded my Daddy
that he had promised to eat dinner at a co-workers home the following day. Well, you would’ve thought I had asked him to
wear a tutu or volunteer at a nursing home considering the look he gave
me. He says he doesn’t like “old
people”.
You see my Daddy is not a social person, which comes
as a bit of a shock to some of you.
Granted he can turn on the charm when he wants to and if you can get
past the shockingly un-PC statements he is prone to make, he will make you
laugh, albeit sometimes nervously and always looking around to see who heard
you laugh as it was probably slightly vulgar.
He can “act right” in front of company when he wants to. Unfortunately for me, I am not considered
company.
To ensure that he remained in a reasonably interactive
mood, I plied him with breakfast at our favorite diner, Jason’s, and let him
get in a nap before we left for Greg and Louise’s. One of the only reasons my father agreed to
attend is that Greg is one of his favorite people seeing as how he looks like a
biker and actually owns a Harley. I
think he likes Greg more than he likes me.
Scratch that; I KNOW he likes Greg more than me as, and I quote, “Greg
is macho”. Shockingly, I am not considered
macho which is a term used exclusively by my father and the Village People.
When we got to Greg’s, I distracted Daddy with
football on the big screen and Ruffles with onion dip until dinner was
served. Thank goodness they had a
Honeybaked Ham, my Daddy’s favorite holiday protein. After we ate, he sat back down with Greg and
watched football and told lies about Vietnam (the country with the fighting
back then) and Germany (the women back then) and other standard après dinner
conversation topics.
After a couple of hours, which was very much
surprising, he said we needed to go as his a-double-s was starting to
hurt. On the way to the door someone
asked why my Daddy calls Adam (my management trainee) George. I tried to explain the nicknames my family
doles out and the odd names my father loves to give to the various animals that
have had the joy of being members of our household. Dogs named Missy, Goober, Digger, Licker,
Snoopy, Satan, Sophie, Pepper, Hot Dog and Lulu. And I just adore my Lulu. I just wish that her name was not the same as
a now-deceased, overweight, reformed stripper who became a Christian and sang
on Hee-Haw. Since my Daddy has claimed
I have “stole” his dog (which is accurate), I have tried to get her to answer
to Paisley but she will have none of it.
You can take the dog out of the patch…
The conversation then turned to the odd assortment of
other animals that we have owned such as horses, cows, sheep, guinea pigs and
parrots. One parrot in particular was named
Seymour. Christmas 1981, we drove the 13
hours from Oklahoma to my grandparent’s farm in Alsatia, Louisiana, population
27, not counting goats or horses. My
mother was driving. I, my sister,
brother, 626 Christmas gifts and our poodle (Pepper) were in the backseat and
my Daddy riding shotgun with Seymour on his shoulder. Yes, you read that correctly. As he was slumped in the front seat sleeping,
some random but soon to be unfortunate heathens mistakenly thought my mother
was the only adult in the car.
Somehow finding enough confidence to terrorize a
family while driving a Ford Pinto, these ruffians proceeded to pass us and then
pull over in front of us and slow down to 20 miles an hour. As I inherited my lead foot from my mother
and because back then Oklahoma highways had no posted speed limit, my Mother easily
passed them, making great time on our sojourn toward the farming community of
her youth. After several episodes of the
passing and subsequent slowing down with these hooligans, my Daddy woke up and
asked her what was going on.
When she explained the situation, it poked the
proverbial bear, and he asked me if I had brought my early Christmas present, a
knife. My sister wondered aloud what
good a pocket knife would do, having apparently forgotten that my father somehow
mis-interpreted my Christmas wish list to include “Bowie knife with 8” blade
and snakeskin handle” when what I had actually asked for was “Electronic
Battleship”.
I grabbed the knife and we had a mid-air swap as he
threw the parrot into the back seat and proceeded to hang his upper torso out
of the window and wave the knife asking the “M-Fers” to politely join him in a
discussion of the merits of leaving us alone.
For some unknown reason, assumingly alcohol, the threat of a large
bearded fellow waving a Bowie knife was not enough to distract these wayward
souls from their intended mission of, I am guessing, “harassing people” because
they repeated the pass and slow down routine several more times.
Having more than enough of the situation that he cared
to endure, my Daddy asked my mother ever so politely if she was finished with
her (glass bottle of) Tab. When she
indicated that she was, in fact, no longer in need of the diet refreshment, he
asked her to pull alongside the Pinto.
When he could see the whites of the driver’s eyes,
like General Washington taught us, he proceeded to introduce the half-full bottle
to the area in and around the driver’s ears, nose and throat, causing an abrupt
departure of the Pinto from the pavement.
And with that, he turned to my mother and said, “Solved that problem,
Mama. Let’s get on to Alsatia.”
Lesson learned?
Actions do speak louder than words.
And that is all I’m saying.
No comments:
Post a Comment