To say my father was straight would be accurate but fail to convey the degree to which he was. On a scale of 1/10, one being totally out of control, and ten being totally in, he was a 200. Keep in mind that by straight, I don’t mean that he was a heterosexual, although he was, but not so much by choice or physiology as by the belief that homosexuality was either a social disease or just people “acting up.” I mean straight-laced, ultra-conservative, totally devoid of “thinking outside the box,” totally unaware, in fact, that there even was a box.
My brother and sisters and I would often joke that dad was 16 years old when he was born. The point of course being that we couldn’t picture him as a child, doing childlike and/or foolish things. Based on his stories of when he was a teenager, I suspect he was more like 35 when he was born. My brother was born when Dad was 23, so the math gets a little confusing, unless you factor in the square root of negative 1 (“i,” to the mathematicians out there), which doesn’t help at all. My point is, I suspect my father was always very straight, even before fatherhood might have made it seem advisable to him.
Being very straight, my father never did anything less straight people, by which I mean normal people, did. I did hear him use the word “bastard” once, which really caught my attention given his reluctance to cuss, much less swear. It turned out he was referring to a certain type of coarse grain carpenter’s file, properly referred to as a “bastard file,” the possession of which he did not have. The injuries he experienced from the lack might have caused a lesser man to use a cuss word or two, but dad summed up the situation by commenting only on how unfortunate it was.
Because dad never swore it was expected, at least by dad, that his children would do (or perhaps more accurately, not do) likewise. I remember vividly being particularly exasperated one day after failing to perform some task or other, the specificity of which escapes me, and proclaiming loudly, “I don’t give a ……………darn.” Now “darn” was not a cuss word, even in dad’s vernacular, but my initial intent did not escape him, and I was reprimanded appropriately. That is to say I received a stern lecture on the proper use of the English language, with emphasis on what and wasn’t acceptable phraseology, and, more important, what words were, in fact, not words at all, could not be found in the dictionary, and thus had no relevance in any case. Of course, he did not actually use any of those “irrelevant” words to make his point, so to this day I’m not entirely sure to which words he was referring, but I can guess.
You might ask what led me to conclude that my dad was so straight, and honestly I came to that conclusion only later in life. When I was very young, I didn’t really have much of a base for comparison, so I assumed all dads were pretty much the same. Dads of the day were always the breadwinners in the family, always worked long hours, always played golf on the weekends, and were never around a whole lot to be observed for comparison purposes. Dads occasionally would take the family on an outing, or offer some instruction on whatever sport was in season, but mostly kids were left to their own resources, and what great resources we had, but that’s another story.
That said, however, I’m pretty sure no other dad in the world followed the Saturday night ritual of my father. Immediately after supper (in those days people had supper; dinner was a term reserved for holiday feasts and special occasions), and after the TV trays were wiped down and put away, dad would get out his shoes for polishing. That is to say dad would get out all his shoes for polishing. His collection grew exponentially over the years. He never threw any shoes away, or any other article of clothing for that matter, no matter how worn, or ill-fitting, or inappropriate to the style of the day. Thus when I was old enough to leave home, his collection ran to about 30 pairs of shoes, dating back at least as many years, all of which got polished on every Saturday night. Now you might ask, as I did, why every shoe got polished every week, in so much as few pairs, and usually just one pair, had been worn since the last polishing. You would learn, as I did, that the polish would dry out over time (time being one week, I assumed), so that the old polish would need to be replaced with new polish. You might be concerned, as I was, that the polish might then accumulate to an unhealthy, or least unsightly, degree. Not to worry: each shoe was meticulously cleaned of old polish with a mixture of “Old English Saddle Soap” and water before the new polish was applied.
Dad passed away a few years back. I am convinced he left behind several dozen pairs of shoes, none new, none in style, some that didn’t fit, but every last one with a coat of fresh shoe polish.
01/15/12
No comments:
Post a Comment