Miscellaneous, etc.

I’m a little late, but I couldn’t let Father’s Day pass by without paying tribute to the valuable lessons learned from my father, both taught directly and shown to me by example.

If there’s one thing I regret about the relationship that I have with my Dad, it’s that I wasn’t perceptive enough to realize all the things he was teaching me, and all those many more things he was trying to teach me that just flew over my head; if there’s one thing that I celebrate, it’s how much more I appreciate all of those lessons now that I understand them, and how I love and respect the man who tried my whole life to spare me from crashing by keeping at least one of my feet on the ground.

So, five important lessons I shall strive never to forget.

1. Make work worth it. Working is swell, making money is great, paying bills is fine, but make your time worth it to you.

   This seems obvious at first, but it took me a little while to really get it. You can say that yea, of course it’s worth it, you’ve got a job and you’re getting by and how could that not be worth it… but there’s that point when you’re sitting at your desk staring straight ahead, and something absolutely tiny happens — your browser crashes and destroys your work, the woman sitting next to you who makes personal calls in Greek all day gets a 5% raise, the project you’ve worked for on three months falls apart because someone cc’d the wrong person on a snotty e-mail — and all you want to do is lock yourself in the handicapped stall of the bathroom and not come out until everyone has left the building.

   Those are the days when you need work to be worth it, when you need your work to be the engine that churns out the money required for you to be in a beautiful place — whether it’s a beach in South America, or a cottage on Lake Muskoka, or the bench in front of a piano, or the bench behind your daughter’s softball game.

   If you can close your eyes for those seconds you need, that precious five-count that will keep you from losing it completely, and see what it’s all for, then you will make it through.

2. Take delight in the little things. Because they don’t come around that often.

   I can still remember walking with my father from our house over to the Dairy Queen, a few kilometers away. If the night was warm enough and it wasn’t too late, we’d get the dog on the leash and go for a soft ice cream, or in moments of pure decadence, a peanut buster parfait. My sister and I would sit to one side, while my father would take on a dipped cone.

   And then we’d get to give the dog one, too.

   Man, that was fun. You ever try to feed a dog a soft ice cream cone? It is the messiest good time you can have with your clothes on, I swear. Our boxer, Duke, was effete enough that he would actually lick away at the ice cream until it was all gone, lingering on the experience and consciously fighting his urge to aggressively chomp the whole cone out of your hand in one bite. Dad used to let my sister or I have the honor of holding the cone throughout this process, delighted as we were by the horror of Duke’s foamy drool running over our hands as he did his work.

   Almost every time, Duke gave himself an ice cream headache. He would shake is head and snort in outrage and confusion, his eyes glassy from the discomfort and confused by the affront of it all.

   Almost every time, my father would have an ice cream headache at the same moment. “Gnnnahhh,” he would say, father and dog suffering together in solidarity.

   We talked about those walks last week over dinner, my sister, mother, father and me. They were memories as clear as day to all of us, clearly identifying my Dad as the culprit of these quiet happy moments.

3. Do not play with matches when someone is trying to burn you down. There will be those people who have painted a target on your back, who have built the kindling under you, who have primed it well with fuel and tinder, who are looking and waiting and watching for their opportunity.

   They are crazy goddamned people. They are people who might have no other way of feeling important, they are people who might truly feel you have wronged them simply by arriving in their lives, they are people who know that you will undo them without even realizing it, and they are people who are sometimes simply fucking nuts.

   We all will have to deal with them sometime. There is no way around it, there is no denying it, and there is no avoiding it. The day will come, just grit your teeth and be ready for it, do the right things for yourself and the people you care about.

   But.

   For God’s sake, don’t give them an excuse. Use your head once in a while, for God’s sake.

4. Let people figure out how to be happy with you, sometimes, instead of the other way around.

   I had just finished telling him about a bad day: Critcized and abandoned, wondering what I was worth, and what I was going to do. It had taken a long time.

   “I’m getting cranky in my old age,” he said.

   “I– that’s crazy, I just won’t accept that, Dad.”

   “I’m getting immune to sarcasm, too.”

   “Fine, fine, I’m listening.”

   “There’s a point you reach where you know what you’re worth, you know what you’re good at, you know what you know. You don’t have to be old, or rich or anything,” he said. “But you know it. You’ve got a handle on yourself.”

   “Right–”

   “No ‘handle yourself’ jokes. I’m barbequing here.”

   “Okay.”

   “But you’re nice. You play nice, you do your best for people, you work hard to please them. And a lot of them, they’re still going to beat you up. They might,” he added, “feel like they can beat you up even harder.”

   “This is encouraging,” I answered. “I feel encouraged.”

   “Sarcasm.”

   “Sorry.”

   “Eventually you realize that the shit is going to come no matter what you do, from most people. I don’t know why it took me so long to decide just not to take it any more. Everyone has their bullshit, and they’re going to put it on you if you let them. It’s such a simple thing, not to let them.”

   “It’s not really all that simple, though, Dad. Sometimes they don’t give you a choice.”

   “Sure they do,” he said, watching his poodle and his terrier chase each other around the yard. “There’s always a choice: You can take it, or you can leave it.”

   It was quiet for a minute. We listened to the steak sizzle and watched the light clouds of smoke billow out from under the lid. Eventually he opened it up and peered at the meat, before saying, “It’s a lot harder when you’re beating yourself up, but the choice is still the same.”

   There was a long pause, but I knew he wasn’t done. You can watch my Dad and know that, there will be words hanging on his lips as though he is not quite done polishing them.

   “You can give yourself shit, or you can leave it. You know who you are, you do your best, and maybe you let people decide how to deal with that, instead of figuring out how to deal with them, huh?”

   No sarcasm this time. “Okay,” I said.

   “Okay,” he said. Then he added, “I hope I didn’t burn this thing. Your mother will kill me.”

5. The greatest gift is in the giving.

   I can pick any family gathering, I can close my eyes and choose any birthday or holiday — appropriate for gifts or otherwise — and see my father giving something to someone. I can see his excitement at picking it out, I can see him going through a hundred ideas of what would work best, I can see the happy enthusiasm at finally getting it all delivered and unwrapped.

   I have lost count of everything my father has given me, and I only wish I could have gleaned more of that sincere and generous nature, too. I have never seen anyone get a bigger charge out of what he could pass along to the people he cared about, and now of course as I write this, I know he was doing it every day.

Five are all I have room for now, but he gives to us all every day we’re around him, and ultimately that’s the lesson I’m proudest to have learned — to recognize just how good a Dad I have, and how lucky that makes me.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.