Yes, You Can
My dad is kind of a forbidding guy. He’s tall, he has a basso profundo voice (in high school, my friends would call my line, get the answering machine, call downstairs, hear Dad say “hello,” freeze in terror, and hang up), and he’s eminently intelligent and eminently organized and eminently, annoyingly practical. We often refer to him as “the sentimental slob” and “the wild spendthrift,” because he’s neither, or Mr. Stupidhead will wander into a room and ask, “So where’s Dad?” and I’ll say, “He’s upstairs, watching soap operas and falsifying his tax return while giggling like a schoolgirl,” and we’ll both break up laughing because Dad would never do any of those things. (Well, okay, he giggled like a schoolgirl once, after Mr. S and I had replaced the claps in the “B-I-N-G-O and Bingo was his name-oh” song with fart sounds and serenaded our parents with a particularly thunderous version, but the giggling occurred during a drive across Montana, the long way, and given that the long way across Montana has very few amusements, fart-related or otherwise, I’d chalk that outburst up to boredom, or perhaps exhaustion.) One time, we made up a story about Dad, clad in a pink midriff-baring t-shirt, sprinting after Leonardo DiCaprio’s limousine and squealing, “Eeeeee! Leeeeeeooooo!” and waving a cardboard sign with “I [Heart] Leo” on it, and we nearly wet ourselves laughing. Maybe you have to know him to see the humor there, but the man cuts his food into bites of exactly the same size, to the point where Mr. S and I have literally become mesmerized watching him work his methodical way through a pork chop. Doesn’t do a lot of squealing, my dad.
But who put the idea in our heads to change the lyrics of “Hark The Herald Angels Sing” to “Hark The Hare-Lipped Angels Sing,” complete with politically incorrect nonsense syllables, and to sing it that way in church? Dad. Who inaugurated the proud tradition of observing pleasantly that “there seems to be something biting my ankles” whenever the family winds up seated near a screaming child? Dad. Who taught us to fashion four-footed dactyls out of the wax that Mini Bonbel and Mini Babybel cheeses come in, and to throw them at the walls and ceilings of our house? Dad. Dad also joined us in a mad spree of cheese-eating one weekend, the better to stockpile a supply of wax, craft a gigantic mondo-dactyl, hurl it about, get yelled at by Ma for leaving wax prints all over the walls in the den, and try not to burst out laughing when a regular dactyl happened to lose its grip on the ceiling and fall on her head right in the middle of her anti-dactyl diatribe.
“That is JUST ABOUT ENOUGH, you two, unless you want to pay for new wallpaper. [to Dad] Why didn’t you stop them?”
“He’s the one who started it, Ma.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean you should keep doing it, Sarah.”
“All right, all right, we’ll stop. Sar, Mr. Stupidhead, give me the wax.”
Ma leaves the room
[Thock.]
“I heard that!”
“That was Dad!”
“Yeah!”
“Don’t make me come in th -”
[THOCK.]
“I HEARD THAT! Do you think I can’t HEAR that?”
“Dad, quit it, you’ll get us grounded!”
“Oh, she knows it’s me.”
“Knock it off, all of you!”
[Thock thock thock!]
“DAD, quit it!”
“THAT is IT. GIVE ME THAT WAX.”
“But Ma, we didn’t -”
“Go to your rooms. All of you. You too.”
“You’re sending Dad to his room?”
“You’re sending me to my room?”
“Don’t encourage them. Hand over the wax. Come on, let’s go.”
“But this is my room.”
“Ma, if Dad goes to his room, do we -”
“I can hurt you.”
“Oh, fine, we’re going. Thanks a lot, Dad.”
And then we’d troop upstairs, grumbling, and we’d hear
[Thock?]
“Oh, you love this, don’t you? You just looooove to make me the bad guy.”
[Thock!]
Dad did get to play “good cop” most of the time, primarily because he didn’t spend as much time with us as Ma did, and thus hadn’t gotten accustomed to scouting every move we made for potential catastrophe. If we so much as opened the kitchen drawer where Ma kept the scissors – not took them out, mind you, just opened the drawer – Ma would hear the runners of the drawer and say automatically, “Careful with those, no running.” We could have opened it in the middle of the night, veeeeeery slowly and quietly, while Ma slumbered peacefully in an underground bunker in another state, while wearing earplugs, with Rancid blasting, and the phone would have rung two seconds later. “Hello?” “Careful with those, no running.” But we could have strolled by Dad’s Barcalounger juggling knives and bottles of rum, and he’d just have suggested adding a few pieces of fruit or a poodle to the mix before going back to his Sports Illustrated. And we loved taking a picnic lunch to the beach with Dad, because Ma would start a half-hour shot clock after we’d taken our last bite of food and not let us into the water until exactly thirty minutes had elapsed, because we’d “get a cramp and drown.” We provided legal documents stating that no kid in the history of anything had ever gotten a cramp and drowned after eating a handful of snack pretzels, but Ma wouldn’t have it. Dad didn’t care so much. He’d sort of half-heartedly suggest that we wait a few minutes before going back in, but seriously, we could have strolled into the sea still chewing the last bite of a Dagwood and I don’t think he’d have gotten up. It’s not that he didn’t care, but rather that he probably assumed we’d yell “CRAMP” really loudly if the need arose, and then he’d get up and fish us out, no big deal.
I’ve made my mother sound like the shrew, and my father like the absent-minded professor, but that’s not the case at all. I do think that mothers generally take a more prevention-minded approach to parenting than fathers. Mothers think, “If my child runs with scissors, she will fall down, and when she falls down, the scissors will somehow defy physics and land on the ground with the tips pointing up, and the scissors will stab my child through the heart and kill her, so I’d better tell her not to run with scissors.” Fathers think, “Well, I don’t know why she’d want to run with scissors in the first place, because I assume she knows that the construction paper isn’t, you know, going anywhere, but if my child happens to run with scissors and fall down, and the scissors somehow defy physics by landing on the ground with the tips pointing up and stab my child through the heart and kill her, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” But here’s the real question: why did parents start thinking about running and scissors in the first place? Has a kid ever actually run with scissors, stumbled, and impaled himself on the blades? No, seriously. Has this happened? It’s like the half-hour-after-eating-or-you’ll-get-a-cramp thing. Show me the proof. Hand me a yellowed newspaper clipping about the tragic death by drowning – crampy drowning, no less – of Such-And-So Kid, age 8, five minutes after he ate the grilled-cheese sandwich with a pickle on the side that sealed his doom. Where do parents get this stuff? I guess it’s like those little tags on appliances, the ones that say stuff like “DO NOT PUT IN MOUTH” and “DO NOT USE FOR PURPOSES OF FOOD PREPARATION,” and you mutter to yourself, “It’s a hairdryer, for God’s sake, what damn idiot would use it to cook a chicken?” and then you realize that someone, somewhere did exactly that and then sued the hairdryer manufacturer when he got salmonella, so now they have to put a “USE THE OVEN TO COOK, NIMROD” tag on it – once upon a time, hundreds of years ago, a kid crossed his eyes, tripped over a root, and lived out the rest of his days with crossed eyes, and now every other kid ever born has to hear about it whenever she makes a gross-out face at her little brother.
Nobody tells you about the hassles of adult life – taxes, dry cleaning, office politics – when you’re a kid, but nobody tells you about all the stuff you can do with impunity, either. The hairs on your mother’s upper arms sense that you’ve just eaten a non-nutritious non-meal of croutons, washed down with Pepsi, but you eat the croutons anyway, because you can. You can eat a snack two seconds before your dinner is ready. You can jump into the pool minutes after winning a pie-eating contest if you want. You can run the Boston Marathon with a pair of pinking shears in each hand. When you go out to eat, you can fill up on bread; when the main course arrives, you can play with your food (witness the lovely Ra, who worked away at her unfinished mashed potatoes while Drab and I chatted, then announced with a flourish, “Behold – the Ziggurat!”). You can pour room-temperature soda over ice cubes and not don safety goggles first (because the ice cubes might explode, but you don’t have to care, because it’s your kitchen and your eyeball). You can stuff an entire package of Big League Chew in your maw and go for a jog, and afterwards, you can stick the wet mess of gum behind your ear. You can cut your own hair, and then wash it, and then go out with a wet head and catch your death. You can merrily ruin your eyesight in various ways – watching TV with the lights off, sitting too close to the TV, reading in poor light, and reading under your covers with a flashlight – and then you can fall asleep and leave your hardcover book facedown! Far away, in another part of the world, your mother tosses restlessly in her sleep and murmurs, “Spine broken pages falling out.” Your father doesn’t stir.
Go on. Life is short. Leave a moisture ring on the coffee table.
[Thock!]
And furthermore, [thock thock thock].
