Toronto (June 16, 2008) -- Yes, I am late for Fathers Day; this was the weekend of the 24 Hours of Le Mans and I had a very busy weekend keeping everyone updated on what was going on (and just as an aside, Peugeot people, you ought to know by now never to get into a scrap with Germans. Nyah). But I did call my Daddy yesterday to wish him Happy Fathers Day and I am very glad he is with us to celebrate one more time. His health is precarious and its day to day with us. We are grateful for all we get.
Daddy is an old fashioned guy and if it were true that "women look for men like their father to marry" its no wonder I have remained single. Daddy grew up with 8 brothers and 3 sisters on a Depression-era farm in Wisconsin and apparently his father excelled only in alcoholism and flim-flam. He learned young that it was part of his responsibility to look after his mother, and he kept looking after her even after she stole most of the allotment money he sent home for her to bank in his name, and used it to give one of his sisters a big wedding. He and Mama married young and this year celebrated their 62nd anniversary. Despite years of hard work at blue-collar jobs (stock car racing, followed by milk inspector, which required him to be away from home during the times when we were home and/or awake) he found time to educate himself on a variety of topics as he could not finish school due to the Depression and World War II. When we were kiddies, til I was 8 years old, we travelled to whatever dirt track or fairground Daddy was racing at in a particular weekend, and we knew we were going when he arrived on Friday afternoon and announced "Pack the car, Ma, we are going to--" wherever there was racing that weekend. Mama would start out by protesting that we could not just pack up and go at the drop of a hat, but within an hour she was packing and getting us ready to go. We learned a lot from travelling around like that. Two things we learned very young: eat what you are given and say Thank You; and sleep where you are told to sleep when you are told to sleep. Oh, and when Mama says sit right there and don't move, you sit right there and don't move. "Watch out for race cars," she repeated over and over. "They will NOT WATCH OUT FOR YOU." We grew up applying that to any number of perils that also do not look out for us. (Although in later years I have nearly been run over by race cars three separate times, that was my own stupid fault.)
Daddy read stories to us just the way Peter Falk read "The Princess Bride" to his grandson. The stories were never as interesting when we read them for ourselves. Although Daddy's spelling is still mainly guesswork, he can write good prose and memorable stories; and he can still recite poetry that he had to learn from the McGuffy Readers for Friday Recitation in the two room prairie schoolhouse he attended until Grade 8. I was in Grade 8 Latin before I found out what "since Hector was a Pup" actually meant.
But the most important story about Daddy I have to tell, and his favourite, is about his teaching me to drive.
Daddy had bought a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 XL that was one of six cars made as "production models" to be turned into NA$CARs, back in the day when they raced Real Cars over there. He got it by threatening to expose the fact that these cars were not being sold to "the public" which would invalidate their fitness for NA$CAR. This is the car he drove 185 mph on a timed quarter mile, and this is the car he used to teach me to drive. I was 17 years old at the time, and Daddy was my idol; what he told me about driving was therefore the revealed word, and I had no idea that what he was teaching me was in fact stock car racing.
So the day came when I took the Yellow Peril down to the examiner's station for my driving test. Let the record show that although I committed numerous egregious non-manual driving sins, I did not hit anybody or anything, and I performed the requested procedures flawlessly although not 'by the book' unless you were talking about a book written by Junior Johnson. The final nail that closed the door to my driving license until I turned 25 and took the test on an old Studebaker Lark VI in car-mad California on a day when almost all the examiners were home with the flu, was when we were heading for the examination station and the examiner told me to turn right when we were past the apex of the turn. I turned right with a dazzling handbrake turn that left a fan of rubber as a souvenier, telling the examiner in a teenaged pout, "You need to tell me sooner when you want me to turn!" Daddy was laughing himself into hysterics as we approached the station. I could see him. The examiner got out of the car, resisted the urge to kiss the tarmac, and said to Daddy, "Do not bring that car -- OR HER -- back here ever again."
Mama was not at all amused, as she had counted on my being able to drive so I could take over some of the duties inherent in getting five girls back and forth to school events and such. Daddy told her not to be such a party pooper, and still loves to tell everybody about how he snookered the examiner on that day. And that was what gave me the taste for car racing that has stuck with me ever since, especially touring car racing where the Tarmac is Only A Suggestion.
Daddy has many redeeming qualities, including his willingness to stick to a task once he has taken it on, and his early assertion that the only things girls could not do just as well as boys were play pro football and father children. But it was, and remains, his willingness to seize any occasion and any vehicle to play a practical joke on Authority, and his zest for life, that made me what I am today...and thus I assert, as I wish Daddy yet another Happy Fathers Day, that I will marry on the day when I meet a man who is more of a man than I am.
And who has a sense of humour that would, after he told them they ought to know better by now, even in car racing, than to go up against the Germans, expect the French to laugh.