What My Dad Taught Me

In a few weeks, I will be celebrating my father’s 106th birthday. I bake a cake because he always wanted cake for desert and was heard often to ask, “What, no cake?” at the end of a family dinner.

One of my first memories is of waking from a nightmare and crawling into my parents’ bed, regaling my father with a detailed description of the house I wanted. Although he had to rise at dawn to drive to the next town to work as a carpenter until after sundown, he listened, questioned and made suggestions for my dream house until I fell back to sleep and woke in my own bed in the morning, 

certain and secure the nightmare would not scare me again.

My father’s love of cake was especially intense for Strawberry Shortcake. The year I turned five, I was allowed the honor of presenting my mother’s famous strawberry, whipped cream and Bisquick biscuit layered cake, carrying it from the kitchen to the dining room. My proud entry, the smile and pride on my father’s face was heart-swelling and … I tripped.

Falling face first into his birthday cake, already crying my heart out, are all I clearly remember of my shameful moment.  Though there was undoubtedly chaos for a moment after the disaster, laughter and a clean-up of me and the floor, I can only imagine mother served another, different cake and my dad ate it with pleasure.

In the following year, my father left our home to find better work to feed his family. When he had a good job with a small construction firm and a place for us to live, my mother drove across the country with me, my younger sister and older brother—newly licensed to drive. When we arrived in San Francisco, I was shocked to be told I’d been enrolled in school and that would start two weeks after my father’s birthday.

But I couldn’t read!

Explaining to my father I was determined not to go to school, not until I learned reading, he sat me down with a book—title forgotten—to teach me how to do this marvelous thing.

My dad never let a teaching opportunity go by without taking advantage. Road trips were chances to have spelling Bees and I could always, by the time we reached our destination, spell the longest word in the English language or the medical term for a recently discovered cure for a condition. We always stopped at roadside attractions such as dinosaur exhibits or local museums and trading posts.

When my younger sister had trouble learning the alphabet, my father spent his very few leisure hours teaching her the letters on a standing chalkboard and magnetic easel we had received as a Christmas present. She thought of it as a punishment but I always saw his efforts as a gift and made an effort to do the same for my children.

My father worked every weekend and evening to repair properties my parents had bought to build a rental property business. They eventually owned several properties and were able to buy their own house.

At this same time, my father discovered square dancing as a favorite leisure activity. My sister and I were too young to be left at home at night or over their weekend Hoedowns so we learned “do-si-do (dosado)” and “Allemande left” with the adult dancers. From square dancing, he moved on to round dancing. He and I practiced, when my mom as presiding over her PTA meetings, in our living room. 

Between them, my parents ran a successful home rental business, while my dad still worked as a carpenter and my mom ran the household and made cakes.

At the age of 53, cancer fatally struck my father. He survived for only six months. My mother had to practice giving him morphine by repeatedly stabbing a syringe into an orange. He was in so much pain, he begged to die but he still had enough energy and commitment to my well-being to tell me to stand up straight.

This year, my dad has been gone for as many years as he lived. I have honored his birthday with my husband and sons—who are all so much like him—with cake and ice cream. And this year, I will make a Strawberry Shortcake but I will give my daughter-in-law the honor of carrying it to the table.

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Boring Letters to My Daughter

I had always considered myself a good letter writer—witty, interesting, and erudite. That is, until my daughter came home for a visit at Thanksgiving and cleaned her room. No, wait. “Cleaned” may be the wrong word. This event occurred over twelve years after she left for college, so what I meant to say was “excavated.”

She came up with quite a few treasures along with plenty of clothes to recycle, lots of stuff to discard, and, after unearthing a package of letters people had written to her at camp, she began to read them aloud to the rest of the family. To my horror, mine were preachy, boring, and lacked any information likely to be of interest to my child.

In defense of my preachiness, let me just say that one of the major themes was writing thank you notes, which needed to be done while my daughter was at camp. Her birthday is early July, so we always had her parties in late June, leaving no time for her to write the notes before boarding the camp bus. Since I could not see whether they had been written or not, I just went with reminders. News of my day, which at the time was nothing if not boring, filled the rest of the pages.

And to think, I wanted to be a writer! I couldn't even entertain my daughter!

Meanwhile, and this is really weird, my husband, who as a lawyer normally sucks the life out of any sentence, particularly when editing my books, wrote funny, lively, charming letters to camp. He even included thought-provoking articles. They were a devastating contrast to mine. And in the one instance where he got preachy, my daughter, during the rereading on Thanksgiving weekend, noticed that he had written it from home rather than work, and I was blamed for being a bad influence.

So what accounts for the inferior quality of my missives? When I wrote to other people I was, or at least I think I was, funny and interesting. Was I saving the good stuff for my friends? Was I incapable of being on the same wavelength as a pre-teen/teenager? Was I just a boring person because I was basically at home too much?

Luckily for my ego, some of what I’d written to our daughter was funny and we were all laughing, but that mostly came from stories about the Seeing Eye puppy she was raising whom she had left behind for her parents to care for while she was at camp. I mentioned in the letters things that had been accidentally chewed, cute incidents, and how things were going when I filled in for her at puppy class.  I’d been criticized for being less than firm while working the puppy, something I had never done before. “It’s not ‘Sit, sweetie,’ I was told by the club leader. Our daughter knew that, but I might not have been listening when she explained my role as a substitute puppy raiser.

I had also written about the kitchen renovations. Who knew that a discussion of floor tile wouldn't be interesting to a 14-year-old?

And how was I to know she was adept at doing all the things I told her to do without being reminded?

I’m glad she brought it to my attention, as embarrassed as I felt. I like to think I’ve learned my lesson and I won’t do it again.  Of course that’s kind of an easy promise since I’ve learned what a capable woman she is. The best part is, she likes the fiction I write.