Dad’s Day 2012

My dad, “Chick,” as he was affectionately known, checked out on Fathers’ Day, 1991. While I wouldn’t characterize our relationship as a close one, he left a few indelible impressions on me from which I continue to draw. Among his guiding principles: Keep your nose clean. Find what you love to do. Put a brick on a brick. Maybe not all that unique, but certainly clear and concise.

He was a great storyteller, and had a few tales that he told a thousand times, if he told them once. Topping the list was the one of my early entry into the world. I was a premature arrival by a month and a half or so, and weighed-in under 4 pounds–pretty scrawny for a 1950’s baby. After a couple of weeks in an incubator, I was allowed to go home, and that’s when the story really took off. According to Dad, they put me in a teacup, then put me near the oven to keep me warm. Apparently I began to thrive, so next they put me in a shoebox, then into a dresser drawer, and eventually to the conventional spaces most children are contained. There was a little hitch later when my head became wedged between the rails of the crib…probably explains a bit about my thinking patterns. (Some regulatory agency has more than likely modified that width by now!) His telling of my evolution was much more colorful–and way more elaborate–than mine. The upshot of the whole tale was the origin of my nickname, “Mouse,” which some of my family still use as my primary moniker.

He was a good man. He loved and supported me, just as he did my siblings. My take is he related a little better to the boys, to football and to golf, than he did to me, but he did the best he could, which is a lesson in itself. I want to do that, too, in whatever I undertake.

While Dad wasn’t always sure how to connect with me, he was generous, and would always slip some gas money in my pocket when I was off to school or heading back to Colorado from Wichita. It didn’t come with a sense of compensating for anything, but truly from a place of wanting to help and give in the way he could.

A few days after he died, I wrote a song for him, “Dad’s Tune,” which I put on the website under the “Hear New Music” tab. No, it’s not new, but it’s still relevant, though he was a Benny Goodman fan, which makes this fiddle/bluegrass-type tune a little outside his style preference. “He had a style about him, of which we all were proud; a gentleman right to the end, alone or in a crowd. He said build your life up brick by brick, and keep your deals real clean; he always asked what he could do for me when the times were hard or lean.” Still seems right to me: well-loved and still remembered, as dads should be.