The Seven Life Lessons My Father Taught Me

What I am about to tell you is painful on many levels. This means, of course, I am about to discuss my childhood. While most of my pre-pubescent to adolescent years were filled with horror, loneliness, and remorse (and that was just in kindergarten), there were often golden nuggets of hilarity swirling in the dark river of my despair.

Take, for example, my father. While being his son was no easy task by a long shot, I’d be the first to admit the old man had a sense of humor. A bizarre, semi-malicious, shocking-to-all-other-mortal-beings type of humor, but a funny bone he had nonetheless. For example: one day my Dad was driving along the street, my Mom in the car and me in the backseat. He happened to observe some random shmuck walking along the adjacent sidewalk. Aforesaid “shmuck” had a poor posture, his head hanging down towards the ground as he shuffled.

Now slumping is bad enough, but not paying attention to where one is walking because the cracks in the sidewalk are more important than, oh let’s say, one’s own personal health and well-being is just risking injury and derision. Which this fellow earned in spades when he walked straight into a “No Parking” sign, his fragile skin cheese-grating along the sharp edges of the metal post as his eggshell-like cranium strove to keep his brain intact and, well, inside his head, so that all the individual neurons could communicate the fact “we’ve just walked into a traffic sign” to one another.

As my Dad’s car slowly drove past, the guy (let’s call him ‘Mr. Head Trauma’) staggered back from the post, a long gash on his head spurting a small arc of blood beautifully highlighted in the gentle spring sunlight. My Mom was horrified, of course: she possessed the instinctive female reflex most women have when seeing men hurt themselves. Those of the fairer sex are well-aware just how much damage us guys can do to ourselves in the pursuit of life practices such as “buzz saw using”, or “barbeque lighting”, or “walking”.

My Dad? He Laughed. Oh My, How He Did Laugh. One of those throwing back your head and cackling in merciless glee types of laugh. One of those guttering chuckles that reminds you of a super villain pointing his death laser at Grandma Gentle's Orphan Home For Kittens. A braying, spraying, guffaw that only re-affirmed the dark, cynical, and essentially evil glee that underlies most human motivations. My Dad was braying so hard that he almost drove off the street, and the fact that my Mom was swatting him with a rented videotape while yelling, “Stop laughing! My God, that man is HURT!” didn’t really help the general situation.

I remember being kinda…afraid for my life, the way the car was swerving back and forth in time to the paroxysms of my father’s gut splitting mirth. But I knew he was a good driver (for the most part; consult further down this article), and I was more interested in watching Mr. Head Trauma anyways.

What could the guy do? He just staggered around and bled, and by the necessity of speed (no matter how much one slows down to view an accident), Dad had to leave the scene. But I swear he was chuckling all day about that one; every so often he’d stop and yell out “GONGGGG!!!!” like some crude ‘traffic-signpost-getting-hit’ sound effect while looking up mock-confusedly and clutching his head.

I got about fifty percent of this kind of humor handed down to me through genetics and brutal conditioning. The other full fifty percent comes from my Mom’s side and thankfully she’s always had a somewhat gentler sense of what's funny. For example: when my Mom got loaded (which wasn’t much when she was married to my Dad, but boy-howdy did she go on a bender when she finally got the divorce papers! A seven year bender! Hope you’re not reading this, Ma!), she liked to steal random objects. We’re not talking about walking into a store and shoplifting, nothing as crude as that. No, she only stole when, like I stated, she was really drunk and only when stealing an object and moving it to another location somehow added to the general hilarity of the situation.

So you can imagine my surprise one dark, winter morning when I awoke and perceived a rhythmic orange glow permeating throughout the entire house. Following the bursts of light to the source I walked into the living room which was currently occupied by a television, a bookcase, a sofa, a passed-out mother on the sofa, and a black-and-orange striped “CAUTION!” traffic post, the round orange warning light on top flashing on-and-off, on-and-off, on-and-off.

I can sort of understand why she took it. What’s funnier than people driving off a half-completed bridge? But what I can’t figure out is why she put it right beside her in the living room before passing out on the sofa. I’m not much of a drinker myself, but I kinda figure that a drunk person should make certain modifications to their environment so that the process of waking up with a hang-over will be, hopefully, a little easier to bear. And I can’t figure out how opening your blood-shot, tequila-rheumy eyes to a UFO-like, 50000-candlepower orange strobing beam of pain could ever alleviate the general nasty business of a hang-over.

I don’t want to portray my Mom as a drunk or a thief; she’s neither. But you can see how her sense of ‘funny ha-ha’ is essentially pacifistic at heart. So I’ve always had these two senses of humour battling it out inside me, like Jesus getting a wedgie from Satan.

But this article isn’t so much about me or my beloved Mom as it is about my Dad, the wisdom he taught me, and the things he did. So without further ado, please indulge my fetish for making lists by enjoying the following ‘Life Lessons My Father Taught Me’:

LESSON #1 FFF