Things my father may or may not know

I was once hit by a car while blindly running across a street. I was 10 or 11 at the time (probably about the same age for most of these). I can still remember rolling up onto the hood of the car and then rolling off into the street. I wasn’t hurt at all, but the lady who hit me jumped out and grabbed me and kept hugging me and crying for what seemed like days. Unfortunately, I wasn’t much into women at that age so I couldn’t properly enjoy her attentions. I do recall that she was kind of cute, in that frenzied, scared to death, and completely shocked sort of way.

When we lived on 14th and Milwaukee, I used to pinch some of the coins you put into that huge glass water cooler bottle and use them to buy sweets at that Asian guy’s convenience store. I couldn’t lift the bloody thing, but since you kept it on the floor, I could sort of tip it over and let the land slide of coins spill out. I would also, occasionally, use this to buy copious amounts of Mountain Dew from the coke machine in the apartment basement. I could really ‘do the dew’ at that age.

I once discovered this huge ‘sugar daddy’ caramel (is it carmel or caramel?) hidden in the kitchen cabinet (I can’t remember where the house was we lived in, but I believe you were dating Willy(sp) at the time). I regularly whittled this down by sneaking bites out of his arms and such and rewrapping him to hide my pilfering. Eventually, before I could finish him, he disappeared. I wonder if you thought we had rats? I was younger then, maybe 5 or 6.

I knew where most of your firearms where hidden and showed them proudly to friends when you weren’t home. As you know, was a fairly intelligent little tyke, so I rarely pointed any of them at, you know, any of them.

My friend Tag (his name was Taggert of all things. Taggert!! Can you even imagine the teasing?), this girl Debi and I once hung out in one of those mini concrete construction tunnels, that used to dot the playgrounds back in the day, and practiced kissing for what seemed like hours, but, since we all know that time passes exponentially slower as a child, was in all probability about 5 minutes.

I punched this kid named Michael in the stomach in the fourth grade because he stole my watch. .. Well, truthfully, I lost it and he found it but refused to give it back. Besides, he hit me first. So I slugged him and he went crying to the teacher the little pansy. I had to stay after school that day while that little bastard got off scott free. The good thing about that was, after that, I got myself a bit of a rep as the ‘don’t mess with him’ guy. I guess when you’re 10 that can be amusing.

I once hit the parrot you gave me, open handed, because the little bastard bit me for no good reason. It flew across the room, or tried to, but since its flight wings were clipped it only did this sad little flutter-splat thing into the wall. Oh, also, sometimes, I would give it boogers and it would eat them! I know, gross.

All the kids in school thought you were, by far, the coolest dad. The one time you came into class with your Denver PD uniform on caused such a stir that they talked about it for weeks afterward. They were, of course, absolutely correct in their assertion. .. You were, and are still, the coolest dad ever.

I discovered your ‘hidden stash’ of educational reading material, and recall vividly being very perplexed by not only why ‘milk’ was coming from that man’s penis, but also what made it ok to be ‘spraying’ it all over that women’s breast?

I liked fire and would often pilfer your matches so I could play with it. Yes, that is what happened to my finger that day, and yes, I did know what happened, but I was far too frightened of telling you I was playing with matches so instead pretended like I had no idea why I had a blister the size of a quarter on my finger.

I liked the way your pipe smelled, during your pipe smoking days, way more than I liked the clouds of cigarette smoke.

Ok, so, bell bottoms were not the best choice of pants to wear to 7th grade in 1983, but it would have been better to hear that from you than from the bastards at school. Yah, I know, I picked them out, but I was 13, what did I know?

They turned my old elementary school (Stevens) into some kind of retro-cool condo-plex. (This school was awesome. It was built using granite slabs and what not. Had a ton of character, well, the building still has character, its just there are garages where my kissing tunnel used to be.)