I was talking with a friend about my last story, My Dad Was Nuts, and she was questioning my veracity and accusing me of exaggeration. I assured her that my stories are all true. Life is so weird, why would I have to make stuff up? So she said that it was probably a rare incident that I was writing about. Au contraire, I replied, and that led to this story.

When I was young, about 8 or 10, my dad had a 1957 Mercedes Benz 190sl, which had constant carburetor problems, and he was always taking both of them off the motor and cleaning and rebuilding them. And cussing about it, like he did about most things that didn’t proceed perfectly. By then, being a smart young man, I had learned to duck behind something when the cussing got hot, because it usually caused things to be thrown, and you could never tell what direction they would fly.

In fact, my first set of tools were ones I gathered that had been thrown. At first I tried putting them back on the pegboard behind Dads workbench where they had come from, but I got yelled at for doing that. Evidently, when a tool was thrown, it was permanently banished from sight. So I had a shoe box that I hid behind the furnace in the corner of the basement, and in it were the banished tools. Not that three or four 10mm wrenches were all that useful, but they were mine. He once threw a large screwdriver (that had slipped on the screw) so hard that it shot through the basement window and into the back yard. In that instance, I learned how to replace a window glass pane and how to apply glazing compound, which is a skill I use today sometimes. And I gained a useful large screwdriver for my tool set. It wasn’t all negative. Picking up after my dad taught me many things that I use today.

Another time, my dad was putting screens on the windows of our house. They were the kind of screens that were frameless, and you cut them to length, and attached a top and bottom rail, and screwed the top rail to the top of the window frame, and the bottom rail had a thumb wheel thingy that you hooked onto the window sill, and used the thumb wheel to tension the screen. One window was problematic. Dad cut it and mounted the top rail, and it turned out to be too long. That is when the cussing started. So, in full voice in front of our house, which the neighbors had long become accustomed to hearing and paid no attention to, he angrily unscrewed the top, re-cut the bottom, and tried again. Still too long.

Uh oh. I ducked behind the oak tree.

He very loudly angrily again unscrewed the top, and took the shears and recut it kind of spastically because he was cussing so hard. He put it up again, and this time it was too short. That gave him a fit of apoplexy, and he grabbed the screen and wrenched it angrily to rip it off the window. It resisted his wrenching, which caused him to cuss so loudly that he ran out of cuss words, and shouted “you mother#^%@* bug (gasp) piss ant!” (I have never forgotten that cuss word.)

Huh? Bug piss ant? What was a bug piss ant? I giggled silently.

He threw the shears out in the yard, and threw himself bodily into ripping the screen off the window, and with great loud effort, yanking back and forth, managed to tear the screen out of the top clamp, and then balled up the screen and bottom rail into a basketball sized clump of aluminum, and threw it as hard as he could. Which, being a piece of screen, and not weighing much, only flew about 3 feet and landed on the ground. That pissed him off even more, so he went and kicked it 8 or 10 times around the front yard, calling it names as he went. I circled around the oak tree to stay out of range. Then he went inside, leaving the screen and tools laying in the yard.

Yay! I got some shears for my tool kit, a very useful tool to have. And I learned the lesson that, in fact, it is much better to cut something too long, than too short.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. It has never failed me.

These kinds of tantrums were just a part of life for dad. And for me, cleaning up after him. I was pretty happy to move out on my own by the time I was 17.

In college I met the love of my life, and married her. My dad was not very happy that I had married a recovering Catholic, but he came to our wedding anyway, though he did not stay long. A couple years later Jenny and I were invited to a sort of family reunion with my sisters and their husbands and kids, and my uncle, and my step moms mom. We were sitting around the dinner table, and my dad got on a diatribe about the education system and its failures. Jenny had been studying teaching, and I got nervous, knowing that she did not suffer fools gladly, and that my dads diatribes were not often based on facts. As he got wound up, dishing out his blather, I could see that Jenny was getting kind of pissed off. He paused for a moment in his bullshit, and Jenny sat forward, ready to contradict his point of view. I was ready to duck. 

She cleared her throat, and said loudly, “Bill, you are so full of shit, and are talking about something that you know nothing about.” I loved her even more at that moment. My dad sat there with his mouth open. I think he knew when he was in over his head, and was thankful when my step mom gracefully changed the subject. Amazingly, from that moment on, he treated Jenny with the utmost respect and kindness.

Years passed, and I was 42 years old, returning from Africa and the Peace Corps, and stopped by dads house on the way hitching back to Texas, to visit him and my step mom. He had just started constructing a porch roof in the corner of his L shaped house. He had drawn a plan for how it was to look. I had just come from teaching woodworking and technical drawing in my high school in Africa for 3 years, and I was very facile with drawing plans, and as I looked his plan over, I had to bite my tongue at how poor a plan it was. It had a pointless off center peak to it that made figuring the angles of the rafters a nightmare. Not to mention how was he to gather and divert the water that would run off it in the rain?

Nevertheless, it was his plan, so I jumped right in and climbed up to work on the most difficult part, knowing that I was a much better carpenter than he was. I was concentrating on getting the framing right, while dad was over in the corner nailing on the end rafter. He started muttering when he bent two nails over in succession, while trying to drive them. I had forgotten the warning signs, and went on with what I was doing, paying him no mind. He bent the third nail, and the cussing started. Before I could react, he had thrown the hammer as hard as he could, and I heard the wind of its passing as it flew by me about two inches from my left ear, and out across the driveway into the neighbors yard. Had I been two inches to my left, I would not be alive to write this story. As usual, when he finished cussing about the hammer and its faults, he got down off the ladder and went inside and went to bed. I kept working, and got all the basic framing done, ready to put on the roofing.

Later that night, I was sitting up late drinking coffee and talking to my step mom, a wonderfully patient woman who really loved my dad, and was one of the most interesting women I have ever met. I asked her if I should go and pick up the hammer and return it to his workbench.

“Oh, Lord no, Sam. Once a tool is banished, it is banished forever. I have learned that. The neighbor’s ditch is full of banished tools.” I laughed. Nothing had changed.

In all fairness to my dad, I have to tell you that he had grown up under an intolerant father. He enlisted in the Army when he was 17, way too young for war, and went to Europe, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge against Hitler, earned several medals for bravery, got shot in the leg, and came home with major PTSD. Back before they really knew what that was.

Then when he was back stateside, he learned that life was not like they promised him that it would be, back when he was young. He was always angry about that. My mom turned out to be an alcoholic, and the marriage ended in an acrimonious divorce, leaving him to finish raising his three kids. His job as a chemical engineer was difficult because of poor management. Even so, my dad was a genius, and invented a number of things that made his company a lot of money. His company, not him. He became angry early, and never got over it. I breathed a sigh of relief when he died, because he was finally done with his misery.

I learned a lot from my dad. I even learned his anger habits, and spent years working hard, trying to eliminate it from my behavior patterns, but it slips out sometimes anyway. In spite of that, he did the best he could. Even the times he punched me in the face and broke my glasses, though I was angry at the time, I knew that it was from his disappointment in life, and in his disappointment in himself for not raising a smarter son. He never let himself see who his son actually was and that was sad. It was a great lesson to me though, and I have learned to always look at who people are, and not who I might think they are, or wish that they were.

Wherever you are, dad, I hope it is a place that has no reason to be angry any more.  

I am a lucky boy in that I had a Jenny in my life to help me be who I am, and counterbalance who I might have become.