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.
