dad jokes

It was 1982 and I was 10.  The walls of the kitchen were light brown paneling and the whole family was sitting around our large, dark brown, oval kitchen table.  All of us except my oldest brother who had a "religious" exemption.  

It was fall and we started the day much earlier than any 10 year old prefers to start his Saturday by getting up and driving to a small grove of pecan trees to “pick up” pecans.  I don’t remember why we went to this place each year, but the tree owners must have been friends of relatives or something.  We’d walk around under the large trees gathering as many pecans as we could manage to carry back to the car in large paper grocery bags.  Picking up pecans wasn’t exactly what I would call manual labor, but it got boring after about 30 seconds.  Still, the hours of stooping over and carrying heavy bags was nothing compared to the hell that certainly awaited me that evening.  

Once we carried the nutty bags inside our house from the car, I would try to sneak away to play while my mom cooked dinner and my dad rounded up the pecan cracker.  Once I was called to dinner, or supper as we called it, there would be no escape – mental or otherwise.  The plates would be cleared, the table wiped, and we’d be told to remain in our seats.  My dad would sit at the head of the table and operate the pecan cracker, a crazy contraption fabricated out of solid wood, a couple of metal pieces, and rubber bands.  I’m not making that up.  If I remember correctly, this thing worked off of rubber band power.  With a large bag of pecans sitting beside his chair, my dad would take a pecan, place it in the metal cradle, pull back another metal piece, and the rubber bands would slam the piece into the pecan, cracking it’s shell.  Pieces of shell would fly off and the debris would start to accumulate.  One by one, dad would make his way through several bags, placing the cracked pecans in a larger bin on the table.  He’d get a bit of a head start before the rest of us started the finger torturing task of picking the pecan pieces carefully out of the shells.  My mom, my middle brother, and I would spend the entire evening doing this.  

Al Gore had not yet invented the internet in 1982 and if you’re a child of the internet it will be difficult for you to imagine how we passed the time back in the day.  Our television set was a console TV in the living room, too heavy to move.  We were just advanced enough to have a smaller second TV on a little rolling cart.  On this night there was a World Series game happening and back then you cared about things like that even if your team wasn’t involved.  Dad had plugged the TV in and wheeled it around the corner so we could see the game while we suffered.

For a very creative and energetic 10 year old, the suffering was partially mental, knowing I had to sit there and do this menial task for several hours.  But there was also a physical aspect to the suffering.  After a few minutes of trying to pick the pecans out of the jagged little shells, your fingers would start to sting.  They’d turn red and irritated as the shells turned into little knives that slowly carved away 16 layers of epidermis through the night.  My oldest brother was in college but was home for the weekend.  I was angry that he wasn’t forced to work so we could suffer as a family.  When he breezed through on his way out somewhere infinitely more fun, it was suggested that he help out.  Not taking it seriously he said that he couldn’t tear up his fingers because he was in architecture school and needed his fingers in perfect condition to draw.  I couldn’t believe my intelligent parents fell for that.  I declared that I was also an artist but I was promptly told to sit back down and get to work.

While the rest of us labored in the 9th circle of hell, sporadic conversations would develop naturally.  I’m sure we talked about school and relatives but often my dad would start talking about his school.  He was a teacher at our school district’s vocational school and he’d tell us about the usual gripes before eventually getting into the funny things he’d do to his students in his classes.  He was fond of pranks and when he wasn’t pranking his peers, he was pranking his students.  He would tell us funny things that his students did and he’d tell us funny things he did to his students.  One of my favorite stories was when he was teaching welding he would focus on safety because of the dangerous nature of some of the welding gases.  While students were doing their welding exercises inside their individual booths, dad would fill up balloons with acetylene gas and walk by and drop them over the welding curtains.  Immediately a welding spark would hit the balloon and there would be a small explosion, scaring the living daylights out of the welding student.  This was, of course, an important educational experience that the students would never forget, but it was also just great entertainment for my dad.  Then later, at the pecan session, it was entertainment for us.  

Dad loved telling stories and jokes.  Once he got started and had us laughing, he was unstoppable.  One story led to another as the uncracked pecan bags began to dwindle.  We didn’t notice because we were laughing so hard and begging for more stories.  These stories were like Legos.  One stacked on top of another all night as dad built this amazing tower of joy for us.  

I didn’t realize at 10 how important this communication was.  I was learning who my dad was outside of my experience with him.  There were stories about his work-life and these always seemed to progress into stories from his childhood.  It was fun to imagine my dad, this larger-than-life man who could do anything, as a child.  He told us about growing up with several siblings in a life before regular access to electricity.  He told us about being jealous of kids who came from money and how he convinced one little snobby kid to ride on a pine tree.  I really loved hearing him tell this story because it was so visual for me.  He and his brothers would climb small pine trees and go up high enough that their combined weight would bend the tree over to the ground.  Then two of them would jump off sending the other one on a crazy ride.  The tree would right itself immediately and the goal was to hang on tight enough so you didn’t get sent flying across the field.  When the punk kid came around one day, my dad talked him into riding the tree.  Dad and others bent the tree over to the ground and the boy climbed on.  All the McAbees jumped off without telling the kid about the importance of hanging on tightly.  I think I remember that one ending in some broken bones.  A bummer for the rich kid but hilariously funny to me.  

Almost all of dad’s stories ended in laughter.  Mixed in with the stories were jokes.  Silly jokes, corny jokes, dirty jokes.  My dad worked with a lot of people who shared jokes with him.  He also had his own welding business after school and on weekends where he encountered all sorts of people.  One of the most effective ways of building rapport with these people was sharing jokes.  Dad would toss a few out and most people would respond with all the funny jokes they knew.  He collected these jokes and traded them as currency.  A quiet moment?  Jokes.  Feeling awkward?  Jokes.  Not sure how to relate to a customer?  Jokes.  Stuck on a bus with church people you don’t know?  Jokes.  Trapped at a pecan shelling table for hours?  Jokes.

Some people just can’t tell a joke.  You know the ones.  They use too many words, they get the timing wrong, or they start laughing.  Some people do all the things correctly but they’re still just not funny joke tellers.  My dad was an Olympic class joke teller.  Perfect wording, perfect timing, and a perfect little smile after the audience started laughing.  He could make you laugh at the corniest joke and he could get away with the most off-color joke.  At the pecan table the really good ones would have my mom objecting with a loud “Louis!” while my brother and I erupted with laughter. 

When people talk about “dad jokes” these days I feel a bit offended.  I know this is a phrase used to describe lame jokes told by a lame dad trying to relate.  I get it.  I’m just sorry y’all didn’t have really funny dads.  Dad jokes to me are the ones that had you laughing so hard you couldn’t stop.  The jokes that stack up one after another until your eyes squint so hard that tears stream down your cheeks.  The jokes that you beg to be told again and again.  The jokes that make you completely forget that your fingers are raw and that you still have another bag of pecans to shell before you can go to bed.  

happy father's day

My dad used to tell me this story.  He was driving north on I-85 near Gaffney when a road crew was cleaning up a black bear that had been hit by a car.  The road crew truck used a small crane arm to lift the bear into the truck bed and they had it raised up, stretching the carcass out much farther than the bear's normal posture would have allowed.  My dad was awestruck by how big the bear was, almost too large for the crane to get it into the truck bed.

We were not mountain people so while we knew bears were around, we didn't see them often.  We were not experts on bear sizes.  The bear intrigued him so that he told me this same story every single time we drove past that particular spot on the interstate.  We drove past that particular spot many times during the last few years of his life.  He told the story every single time.  

If you're lucky enough to have a dad that you speak to, this is likely to happen to you if you both live long enough.  Perhaps it's not a bear or even an animal but there will be a story (or many stories) your dad will tell you over and over again like it's the first time.  It may annoy you and you may even interrupt him and tell him that he's already shared this story.  What you may not know is that proper child etiquette states that you should listen to the telling of the story, never letting on that you have heard it before.  You should analyze the story for hidden meaning and you should commit the story to memory.

These days, I'm a dad.  I'm not saying I have children, y'all know that.  You don't exactly become a dad when you father a child and it enters the world.  It takes experience to become a dad.  This is not something I pretend to understand completely so you'll just have to trust me on this but what I can tell you is that at some point after I had kids running around my house, I started to understand that dads have a secret agenda of things to take care of in the household.  This is not just the list of rules and having the job of scolding kids who don't follow those rules.  It's not just letting the kids eat cake and ice cream for every meal when the mom isn't at home.  It's not just tossing or kicking the ball outside and it's not just the telling of cheesy jokes.  The secret role of the dad is to constantly remind the children who they are.

One of the many things They don't tell you when you become a parent is that kids need to be constantly told who they are.  Most of us dads have tried over recent years to give our kids things and opportunities because we think that makes them happy and productive citizens.  I might argue that this miscalculation on the part of dads everywhere has created a generation or two of children who have all the gadgets and play all the sports but have no idea who they are.  One wouldn't have to try very hard to find multiple applications to that statement.  Just think about this one train of thought...what if all dads constantly reminded their daughters that they were of high value and that they were deserving of love and respect and that they were expected to contribute in an important way to their community?  Can you imagine the army of intelligent, driven and powerful women we would have in position to help fix this planet?  And if this is not currently happening, guess who is to blame guys?  This is a dad job and it can't be pawned off on an older child or even a mom.  Mom's have this whole other encyclopedia of secret agendas they have to deal with.  They can't do our job too.

I think about the stories my dad told me.  Some he told over and over again.  Some he only told once.  Some of the most important stories were not even stories at all.  They were silent actions.  Choices made.  Sometimes just a look.  And with my dad, sometimes it was just a joke.  A joke that sits with you years after it was spoken.  A joke that wasn't a joke at all, it was a statement reminding you who you were.

I came into this parent thing kicking and screaming.  I was scared.  Kids bring responsibilities and you have to open up your heart and allow yourself to love new people.  You have to then turn those people over to the world and allow them to run free in it.  You have to feel and you have to be willing to be hurt and I didn't want to sign up for that.  Lucky for me, G did.  It took her 11 years to wear me down and it's a well known family legend that when she told me she was pregnant, my first words were not family friendly.  But now...

I've got these two wonderful little humans and I'm having a blast with them.  For every difficult thing about parenting there are 20 adorable giggles and 53 goofy faces.  For every emotion I'm forced to feel there are 431 fart jokes and 39 hugs.  I'm gonna call that balance.

But for every fun thing, there's also a task on the secret agenda.  I have to find a thousand ways each week to tell these kids who they are.  

My dad told me stories about learning to laugh during difficult times.  He told me stories about being observant and applying what you learn.  He told me stories about great mysteries and told me that you can never figure everything out.  He told me stories about finding ways to help other people.  There was mischief, adventure, some questionable language and overcoming obstacles.  He was always telling me who I was long before I had a clue.

Maybe your dad was/is telling you something other than a story.

Because it's Father's Day, here's a link to another time I wrote about my dad:  http://hermitshead.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-to-eat-elephant.html

cashews

My dad loved cashews and pecans.  Mixed nuts were fine, deluxe mixed nuts were better, but a whole container of cashews or pecans was heaven on earth to him.  When we were kids, my brothers and I knew that if there was a can of cashews in the cabinet, we could only sneak a few handfuls or we'd be in trouble.  

It was completely normal for dad to eat a small can of cashews in one or two sittings.  You know the kind of eating where you know you should stop but it just tastes so good?  I'm sure you have a binge food too.  In fact, there's a great story about my dad eating lots of pecans that I'm sure I shouldn't tell on the internets.  You'll have to ask me in person for that one.

Cashews differed from pecans in that pecan trees were native to our yard.  My parents were wise enough to plant several pecan trees many years ago and those trees have been kindly delivering their produce every winter that I can remember.  Mom has giant bags of pecans in her freezers and she is a pro at oven roasting them.  Essentially, pecans were free.  Cashews were pricey.  After all us hungry kids moved out, dad was able to store and eat his cashews in peace.  Mom started buying the double sized cans and placing them on shelves higher than the grand kids could reach.


About a month after my dad died I was at my mom's and we were talking.  Before I left she reached for the unopened can of cashews in the picture above and pushed them toward me.  She told me that she had just bought them before dad went to the hospital and he never got a chance to open them.  She knew I loved them too and wanted me to have them.  To be clear, she intended for me to eat them.  She was very matter-of-fact about it.  Here is a can of cashews, Doug likes cashews, therefore Doug should eat these cashews.

But I can't open them.  

I couldn't open them a year and a half ago and I can't open them now.  I know that's pretty dumb and G and I get cracked up thinking about what my dad would say about it.  He'd tell me to eat them.  He'd tell me to eat them all in one sitting and enjoy every bite.  He'd probably tell me I was an idiot for not eating such a large can of deliciousness before now.  He probably laughs at me every time I look at the can without opening it.  And if the can ever disappears I'll know that he finally found a way to come back and enjoy those cashews.


So maybe I'm just weird.  I don't know if other people would do the same thing, but somehow that can has become important.  Too important to open.  Now that this particular image has become so closely associated with my dad and his passing, I think about cashews differently.  I still eat them, just not this can.  And when I do eat them, I consider my dad and remember his zeal for eating cashews.  I remember sitting in the living room watching TV with him.  I remember his laugh.

As a human, maybe I'm odd.  But for me as an artist, this is how everyday images can become charged with meaning and can become ingredients for drawings and sculptures.  The cashew now has at least two different meanings and since I've noticed that, the image may begin to make an appearance in my sketchbook.  But that can is staying in the cabinet.  Unopened.