Dear Santa

As far back as I can remember when I was a child, my dad made a point to remind my sisters and me every year on Christmas Eve that Santa liked to have beer left out for him at some houses instead of milk.  I remember asking Dad if Santa would mind if the beer was hot by the time he got to our house and Dad said, no, any beer is good beer, even a hot one.  

Fast-forward a couple of decades later when I told my own children that Santa liked beer instead of milk.  Things went according to my plan until my older daughter was asked to write a letter to Santa as an assignment in her first grade class.  The letter started out like most of them do: "Dear Santa,  Hi! How are you?"  It was written in very neat handwriting with good spacing and sizing of the letters, and I’m sure the teacher was very impressed, until she got to the more unique part where my daughter wrote, “My mom says you like behr more than milk do you? Even hot?”

My daughter finished the letter with her list of a few things she wanted Santa to bring her that year and a “Thank you!” and then signed her name at the bottom of the page.  She added a couple of little drawings out to the side which she often did in those days; I doubt that distracted the teacher from the Mom ♥ Beer message in the body of the letter though.  The letter was mounted on a piece of construction paper and taped to the classroom wall for all to see at the PTA Open House that week.  I remember telling my dad about it on the phone the next day and hearing him laugh through the phone as if it were the world’s funniest joke.   “It’s like a treat you gave to yourself years later,” I told him, to which he laughed even harder.

Speeding

Last week, I was issued the first speeding ticket I've gotten in almost 19 years.  Seeing the blue lights in my rearview mirror, I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road and rolled down my window.  As I sat there waiting for the officer to walk over, a vivid memory of my dad came flooding back to me; I would venture to guess it isn't too often that a person who is about to be ticketed for speeding has a smile on their face and a sparkle of tears of joy in their eyes as they hand over their license and registration as I did, but having the flash of the good memory made it worth the price of the ticket to me.

As I've mentioned, my dad hated to be late to anything. While I was growing up, that desire to be not just on-time but EARLY often translated into driving above the speed limit for him, especially considering there were four females that he had to get out the door and into the car before we even got on the road.  As a result, he got lots of speeding tickets over the years, especially on long distance trips, which we took as a family pretty often.  

It wasn't as if he didn't try not to get speeding tickets: I remember when those label makers first came out on the market and Dad was so excited to buy one.  He used that thing to make sticky labels not so much for organizing and identifying things as I'm pretty sure it was intended to be used but much more for creating reminder notes for himself, including several "Don't speed" messages that he put on the dashboard of the car.  

I also remember him putting sticky notes up in the car to keep an ongoing tally of how many "points" he had from speeding tickets; he was always worried that he would lose track and go over the limit, which would have resulted in a suspension of his driver's license. 

The other thing he did to try to keep from getting too many speeding tickets was to buy a radar detector, or, as we called it, a Fuzz Buster.  That worked pretty well for awhile, until the police caught on to what people were doing and started just pulsing their radar guns at cars to keep drivers from getting a warning; that presented a problem for Dad, especially when we had to drive through states with "no radar detector" laws.  Dad couldn't keep track of which states ticketed drivers for that and which didn't, and so he just used his anyway anywhere we went and then, whenever he got zapped by a pulsing radar gun, he quickly unplugged the Fuzz Buster and threw it to us kids in the back seat of the car so we could get in on the conspiracy and hide it for him, which we thought was great fun. 

Another thing I remember about Dad's speedy driving habit is how much he hated it when the Sammy Hagar song "I Can't Drive 55" came out, which I think was in the mid-80's when the national speed limit was changed to a maximum of 55 MPH, something that Dad thought was very un-American.  

In the times when he did get pulled over, he was always a good sport about it, typical of his "win some/lose some" mentality.  In fact, I guess he thought the officer that was pulling him over deserved a laugh because he often tried to joke with him or her by doing things like rolling down his window and then acting like he was placing an order at a fast-food drive thru window: "I'll have a hamburger, an order of fries, and a large Diet Coke," he'd say, sometimes getting a laugh from the cop and other times getting a really mean scowl, which we later had fun imitating amongst ourselves in the backseat after Dad had taken his ticket and sped off again.

Casting Our Votes

In my family, we have a running joke about voting that came from my dad, who always told other family members how he was planning to vote and then said "Don't vote against me!" (jokingly - I think). He always told my mom in particular not to vote opposite of however he said he was planning to vote; "We'll just cancel each other out if you do!" he quipped before every election.  (I'm pretty sure Mom still voted her own way anyway!)

I remember the first time I was going to vote after I'd turned 18; Dad, of course, sent me off to the polls with an encouraging pat on the back and a "Don't vote against me!" directive.  I think he was glad when first I and later both of my younger sisters were finally old enough to vote because he thought it upped his odds for having one person in the family vote his way, as he put it.

This week, his words came back to me - in fact, they popped right out of my mouth - as my 18 year-old daughter and I stepped away from our respective voting machines after we'd voted in the state primary election.  I got several glares from the poll workers (or whatever they're called) and others in the vicinity; I guess they thought I was seriously trying to influence her vote.  She recognized the source of the quote right away; she'd heard me tell about how my dad used to say those very words every time before an election, and we got a good laugh out of the whole thing.

Gramps would be SO PROUD! 

There really is always something there to remind me, and for that I am so very grateful.

This One's For You, Dad

There are a lot of things about my dad that someone who didn’t have the privilege of knowing him well might not really understand - things that were such a part of him, things that really made him the person he was, things that I want to be sure to always remember. Here are a few:

*Many times when he wanted to buy my mom a present, he couldn’t figure out what to buy, and so he went to a store that sold women's clothing and just bought everything on one of the manikins, including the shoes and jewelry. He would point to a manikin and say to the sales clerk, "She looks about the same size as my wife. Can I please buy everything she has on?"
*He tried desperately to keep up with technology, including social networking, because, as he said, "I need to stay connected!" However, he often got things in this category confused. Despite many lessons from his grandchildren, he never understood how other people could see what he put on his Facebook profile. And he sometimes got mixed up about the term "text" and called it "twist."
*Whenever he competed in races that he didn't really have a chance of winning, he often made up a category and proclaimed himself the winner of that. For example, once after a biking race, he said, "I didn't win my age group, but I was the first guy over 50 to finish who didn't wear biking shorts." (He wore running shorts when riding his bike early in his biking "career.")
*He was preparing to do an Ironman triathlon, at the age of 67.

*He thought it was a good idea to “round up” in the amount of exercise time – he regularly told my mom that he was going to run or bike for a certain amount of time and then actually went for longer, basing his time on how long he thought it would take her to notice he had exceeded his original “bid”
*He once told his grandchildren to load up in the car for a “big surprise,” which ended up being a sale he had found for some fake-Croc shoes AT A GAS STATION.
*He LOVED to try to jump out and scare people, and this became a long-standing family joke because he was TERRIBLE at hiding. And every ghost story he told ended the same exact way, with him saying something like "And the boy went up the ladder, climbing the first step, then the second, then the third, until SOMETHING GRABBED HIM - his friend!" (Even when the kids were young, they weren't at all scared by his ghost stories.)
*Anytime a holiday was coming up that involved a gift for him like Father’s Day or his birthday, he would suggest (repeatedly) that we give him the gift ahead of time. Then when the actual holiday rolled around, he would jokingly say that we didn’t give him anything. Which brings me to what made me think of some of these quirks …

Last night, I dreamed that I was talking to Dad on the phone, and he laughed and said, “Thanks for calling, but what did you get me for Father’s Day? I don't think I got anything from you.” After thinking about it, I now have a new plan:

CANCER IS NOT GOING TO KEEP ME FROM HONORING MY DAD ON FATHER’S DAYS FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!

So here’s what I got you this year, Dad, and I hope you like it: