My dad

My dad's a weird dude. Maybe it helps to know a little bit about his upbringing. He grew up on the Shutts Road, named after our family for being the first to permanently move there around 1815 (my dad swears it's named after him for being the first person from the road to go to college). He was in the 7th of 9 generations so far who have lived within a space of about 2 acres. Think about that...2 acres and everyone from your great-great-great-great grandparents on down has lived there. They didn't have any running water until the 1960's. That might not be a problem if you live in the South. But imagine it here in Upstate NY - it's 25 degrees below zero, there's 3 feet of snow on the ground, and the wind is blowing 30 miles an hour. Now imagine that you've got diarrhea and you have to run outside to the outhouse every 20 minutes. Not only that, but you've got to fight off the 9 other people who live in your home just to get to that outhouse.

Eight brothers and sisters. My dad's job was to peel potatoes. My mom says that when they first got married, she once asked him to peel potatoes for the two of them, and he had already stripped about 6 before she could stop him.

And speaking of outhouses...one of the great traditions on the Shutts Road took place every year on Halloween night. The neighborhood kids would go around and tip over as many outhouses as they could get away with. Unfortunately, sometimes they'd play hide-and-seek that same night. Dad told me about this time when one kid, either chasing or being chased by someone else, came flying around the corner of a neighbor's home and fell right into the hole that was no longer covered by one of the overturned outhouses.

But my dad, yeah, he has always been Mr. Baseball. He graduated from the Shutts Road and went off to college to play baseball. I guess you could say he majored in Phys. Ed., but whatever. He was the stereotypical dumb jock. Pulling pranks on campus, getting kicked out of sporting events, proud of his C+ GPA because it meant he could stay on the baseball team. One of my favorite stories he tells from his college days was when his roommate was being a douchebag to everyone else. So, to get back at him, they all went in after him one night while he was asleep. He was wearing just his tighty whities, so they stripped all the covers off him, tied him to the mattress so tight he couldn't move, then dragged the bed with him attached to it down to the campus quad. It was a warm night, so he didn't get hypothermia. But the next morning when all the other students were headed to class and found him still there, he got more than a few sarcastic comments.

My parents went to the same college, all 4 years. They knew all the same people, and one of my dad's roommates even dated and ended up marrying one of my mom's roommates. But they never met until the last semester of senior year. They were both education majors, though my mom was more of the typical bookworm. She was still dating her fireman-grapefarmer-turned-politician from back home. My dad was single and looking. Just at the end of the first semester of senior year, the college made it mandatory for all education majors to take a Drug Education Class in order to graduate. So now, all of a sudden, there are 600 or so students who need to take this one class at the same time in order to get their diplomas. My mom shows up to class on the first day and sees her friend's boyfriend and decides to sit next to him. Then my dad comes to class and sees the same guy, who he also knew, and sits on the other side of him. All through the lecture my dad and this other guy are checking out and commenting on all the girls in the room. As the class lets out, feeling pretty good about himself, my dad decides it's time to make his move on his future wife. Keeping in mind the stark contrast between their upbringings and personalities, i.e., my mom was the 95-lb nerdy girl who claims her sport growing up was skee-ball...my dad decides to go with what he knows best. He asks her if she wants to go see the minor league hockey team play that weekend. She counters with a polite, yet firm, 'no' and makes her way out of the lecture hall. Shot down. The next week, he decides to take a different approach.

"So what are you doing this weekend?"
"I don't know, why?"
"Wanna go watch the indoor lacrosse game?"
"Sure."

Somehow, in some strange twist of fate that I have given up on trying to figure out, it works and he's got his foot in the door. It blossoms into a relationship, and she ends up dumping her boyfriend from home, with whom she'd spent the past 5 or 6 years. To be funny, my parents like to tell people they met taking drugs, as in the Drug Education Course. My grandparents didn't see the humor at first.

The first time my mom went to meet the rest of my dad's family at the family compound on the Shutts Road, she discovered the North Country accent. One of the brothers asked her politely to "Pass the 'buh-DAY-duhs". Not wanting to seem rude for having no idea what he was talking about, she pretended not to hear him. When he asked again, she really panicked, and froze out of fear of passing the wrong thing. Finally another of her future brothers-in-law motioned toward the POTATOES, and she was relieved to hand them over.

So back to my dad being a weird dude. He's always been a baseball coach. And if you've ever known a baseball coach, or any coach for that matter, you know how colorful their language can be. And by colorful, I mean they can make a drunken truck driver hopped up on speed and meth-amphetamines blush. But my mom, being the "perfect one," as she's been dubbed by her siblings, wouldn't allow such language in the house where her children were to be raised. So my dad was forced to resort to other expressions. For example:

"Holy ever-lovin' cow!" = Why surely you can't be telling the truth.
"I'll tell you what, Mr. Jack!" = You will find this hard to believe, but it is the truth.
"You snake in the grass!" = You have done something that I'm not fond of.

He also liked to kid around with us when we were little. I remember several times asking my dad where he was going, and having the following conversation:

"Where ya goin', dad?"
"Crazy!"
"No, where ya goin', dad?"
"Timbuktu!"
"No, where ya goin'?"
"I'm goin' to Tupper Lake."

By this point, I'd given up and left him alone to go wherever the heck he wanted. I thought for the longest time that Timbuktu was a fictitious place. I would later find out that it is a city in the west-African nation of Mali. I also believed, through the same reasoning, that Tupper Lake (which was often referred to as Upper Tupper Puddle) was a made-up destination. So when I was perhaps 5 years old and riding in the car with my parents, and saw the roadsign saying something like "Now Entering Tupper Lake," I thought I'd entered the Twilight Zone. Not only was it a real place, but it was within driving distance of my house!

As we grew up, I guess my mom started to relax her control of Dad and his behavior, because we started to hear the unfiltered words come from his mouth. For example:

"You're frickin' A right!" = I whole-heartedly agree with you.
"Yeah, that and a rat's ass, buddy!" = I whole-heartedly disagree with you.
"Shit and a rat's ass!" = ??????? (I have no idea what this is supposed to mean, but it has been used in all sorts of contexts.)
"Well frick me runnin'!" = I am quite pleasantly surprised.

So yeah, that's my dad. And he sometimes doesn't recognize me when he sees me. A few years ago, the college baseball team he coached for was playing near where I was in college. I talked to him on the phone the day before the game telling him I would be there. When I got to the game, I went up behind the bench, tapped him on the shoulder, and gave him a quick "Hey" and a smile. He stood up, looking at me with an expression on his face that was half confusion and half annoyance. A few seconds later he realized that this was his own son, you know, the kid who'd lived in the same house for 18 years, who was making him poor in order to attend college, and who shared half the same genes as his. I hoped he felt stupid, but I'm not sure he did. Later in the game, he came over between innings for a quick chat with my girlfriend and I. In those 30 seconds, he decided to tell us about the abscess he'd just had lanced from the back of his throat, which had been giving him bad breath for weeks. He felt the need to tell us about how much of it drained into his mouth, and how awful it tasted. Then, with a quick, "Man that abscess was wicked," he was off to his duty as third base coach.

Shortly after that was my grandmother's 75th birthday get-together. This was maybe the 3rd time that Michaelene, now my fiancee, had met my parents. We drove an hour from college to meet up with the rest of the fam. Our first stop was my parents' hotel room. We were there a few minutes early, so my father hadn't had time to fully primp for the occasion. As we were talking to my mother, I noticed my father walking toward the other side of the bed and pulling his pants down. He had to tuck his shirt in, but instead of going behind the closed door of the bathroom he felt that in this 10 foot by 10 foot room he'd be invisible if he were on the opposite side from us. My mother didn't see him, which was fortunate for everyone. A look of panic made its way to my face. When Michaelene first saw me, she didn't know what was wrong, not yet having seen his black boxer briefs which have so painfully burned their image into my memory. Then she looked and saw him doing his thing, and managed to keep a straight face long enough for us to regroup in my car. I had to explain to her a lot of what I've just written about my father. Then things seemed to make more sense. But yeah, my dad's a weird dude. You're frickin' A right, he is.