Expressions of Love

You want something to cry about? I'll give you something to cry about.

When I call, you come running.

Do that again and I'll give you a shoe.

There are a lot of grades here. All A's and a B+. So, what happened in English?

Funny the things we remember about our fathers from childhood. And despite how these sayings of his may sound -- and how I likely felt when he said those things -- the memories of my father from those days so long ago are fond. Quite fond, actually. Because, and I knew this then, this is how my father expressed love.

My dad's not much of a talker, at least not to children. In many ways he seemed uncomfortable around younger people. (To this day, I remember how uncomfortable it was as a kid to drive even 30 minutes alone with him -- unless you liked silence.) But where he thrived, where he truly excelled, was in the arena -- that vast and fertile coliseum -- of discipline. My oh my, was my father The Stern Disciplinarian! Look it up on Wikipedia and you'll see a photo of my dad.

It's as if the only job description he ever saw for 'Father' read something like this:

1. Produce offspring
2. Provide for them
3. Define the rules they should live by, with Rule #1 being: Respect Thy Father
   
4. Enforce those rules with unwavering conviction (but, when spanking, use a shoe to protect your hand)
5. Create new rules as needed to keep your offspring in line
   

Probably got that job description from his father, a very serious man who left eastern Europe one small step ahead of the Nazis.

But if that was the description he had, my dad performed the job with enthusiasm and relish. He was, without a doubt, brilliant at it. There were four of us who knew the deal, did our best to avoid 'the shoe' (a soft-soled slipper, the thought of which was much worse than its reality), and shuddered when my mother spoke what to us were The Words Designed to Invoke Great Terror: Wait until your father gets home.

And great terror those words did invoke.

One of the rules my father invented as he went along -- or, more accurately, as we grew up -- was that there were to be no long-distance phone calls. (This was years before the days of cell phones and unlimited long-distance calling.) For my father, paying the phone company a dime more than necessary was a crime of the highest order. Unfortunately, my sister and I had friends beyond our local area code, friends who lived all the way across the bay in San Francisco. Yes, a toll call away. Which, of course, made us criminals once a month, every month.

We'd know when the phone bill arrived because my father would come to the dinner table -- eating together as a family every night was sacrosanct -- with the phone bill sticking well out of his shirt pocket for everyone to see. To build the suspense -- the fear! -- he'd say nothing about the bill during the entire dinner. We'd have a typical, laugh-filled dinner and all would seem right with the world.

Why we'd forgotten that we were in the presence of The Master of the Household, The Maker and Enforcer of the Rules was anyone's guess.

For just when my sister and I began to think about asking to be excused from the table, my father would slowly reach for the bill, languidly open it, peruse its detail painstakingly, and utter a few, quiet statements to himself to make the fear truly palatable ('That was a long call...', 'Who's going to pay for this I wonder...', 'Three calls to the same number in one day, in one day?...', 'Three dollars and fifteen cents in long-distance calls...'). He'd then look up, give my sister and me The Eye and ask, "I thought we agreed not to make long distance calls." In that quiet, measured tone of his that preceded The Wrath of Dad.

Let death come now, I thought. If there's a God, please let death come now.

But that was it. I bit of scolding for making, gasp!, $3.15 worth of toll calls. ('It's not the money', he'd say. 'It's the principle.') Admonishment for using the phone in such a wanton, reckless fashion. Threats of punishment if such irresponsibility continued. And then a curt dismissal from the dinner table.

Dear God, no need to kill me now. I seem to have survived this month's phone bill. Stand by 4 weeks from now. I may need your services then.

That's my dad. A man of principle and a short set of rules. A man who thought paying for chrome fenders on a car was a waste of money because you can't see them while driving. A man who had no use for authority, even though he inflicted it on his children. A man who insisted we come running when he called. A man who only wanted and continues to want the best for his kids. Even if he can't quite form the words to tell us he loves us.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.