Tags
cars, Family, father, Fathers Day, humor, learned from my father, parenting, top ten
Although my father is gone, I’m still so grateful for the things he taught me. So I’d like to take this Father’s Day to thank him again and to re-run this post from last year.
Ten: Take care of your shoes.
With ten kids, shoe leather represented a significant investment for my parents. My father had a shoe shine box, and made sure we all knew how to polish our (and his!) shoes. I can still remember the heady fumes of Kiwi brand shoe polish with its little open/shut key on the side, and how astonished my college roomies were when they saw me applying ox-blood red (the ultimate in classy shine) to the one pair of boots I had for all four years.
Nine: Look it up.
Never use one little word when a big one (or two) will do. If we didn’t know the answer, that’s what the Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia that we bought one volume at a time from trading stamps at the grocery store was for. (We just had to hope the answer wasn’t in volume St-Te because we somehow got two of the preceding volumes instead.) By the end of an average family dinner, multiple volumes would be open on the table.
Eight: “Vacation” is a matter of semantics.
Sure, some of his colleagues took their families on ski vacations and trips to Europe. My father crammed kids into the Vomit-Comet and took us to the drive-in for mini rootbeer floats. Every few years there would be a road trip from California to visit the relatives back east. We’d pull into a KOA campground each night, amazing nearby campers with the speed at which we set up tents. What they didn’t realize was that nobody got to go to the bathroom until that was done. Thanks to those road trips, my siblings and I have great memories and strong bladder control.
Seven: You say “cheap” like it’s a bad thing.
The winner is the one who finds the gas station where Regular is 2-cents cheaper. Even if you had to spend that much to drive there. This was so ingrained that I was shocked when a date handed me a dollar and begged me to please go to the nearest gas station, just because I’d been cruising on fumes looking for the best deal. I took the dollar and dumped the date.
Six: Car maintenance.
His daughters had to be able to change a tire, check our oil and water, use (and always carry) battery cables, drive a manual transmission, and hang out in the garage with him while my father fixed everything else on our cars. TV-Dads would come into their TV-daughters’ bedrooms (the ones with the princess light-up phones, frilly curtains, and matching canopy beds that they didn’t have to share with two other sisters) and give poignant, valuable life lessons. We handed our father the wrench, and sat in the front seat to push the brake/gas pedal/ clutch as requested. So far, none of us has ended up an axe murderer.
Five: There is always plenty of food and room for family.
If you rang our doorbell at dinner time and you were a cousin, knew a cousin, or correctly guessed the partial name of a cousin, you were brought in, another plate was jammed into the dozen already set up, and you got the first serving of pot roast. Meanwhile, kids were evicted from the “guest” room and you were urged to stay the night. At least.
Four: If you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain.
The “News Hour” was a sacred ritual, ammunition and fodder for the sixty-plus year Republican vs Democrat debate in which he and my mother never missed the opportunity to cancel each other’s vote.
Three: Go to college.
People used to ask how he got all ten kids to go to college. The answer was simple: we all thought that our only choices were go to college or go to Notre Dame. Some people have deer heads or fish as trophies, but my father’s proudest trophies from his victories over forty-plus years of tuition payments were displayed in his case containing mugs from each of our colleges.
Two: Stop and help.
If I was driving home late at night and I saw a couple of cars pulled over, one with the hood up, I could almost guarantee that the second car would be my father’s. It never occurred to him to wait for someone to ask for help. On one of our road trips, our trailer was demolished when we were caught in the side winds of a passing tornado. All of us and what belongings we could salvage were crammed into the car, piled literally up to the roof. We’d been driving across the desert for hours and hadn’t seen a single car in any direction when we passed a car pulled off the road. Of course my father stopped and offered to help. When he couldn’t get their car started, he offered the young couple a ride. They looked at our car in disbelief and told him they would wait for the next car. To the end of his life, my father worried about what ever became of them.
And the number one thing I learned from my father was what to leave behind.
Like most parents, my father worried about leaving an estate for his children. But his devotion to our education ensured that we’d have the tools to build wonderful lives for ourselves. And his legacy of how to be the best possible person, parent, and friend did far more to guarantee a good life for his children than the material possessions he left behind.
Rosie Amber said:
Lovely Barb, I have some wonderful images of you all growing up, thanks to your devoted parents.
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barbtaub said:
Thank you so much! And you’re right–with parents like them, we were definitely the lucky ones.
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Paul said:
That is so cool Barb. Your Dad sounds like salt of the earth. I really enjoyed this post. Parts of it reminded me of my own Dad. He would always stop to help others and fixed/built everything himself – including building our house, even though he had no formal training in construction. You know in their generation they did everything they could or at least tried. Now we have “people” for each task – I wouldn’t even consider building a house.
I remember when I was trucking seeing the wrecked campers from cross-winds on the plains and the desert. I felt sad for the owners. Turning the joy of vacation into the horrors of seeing it all broken and destroyed. That must have been a real downer when that happened Barb.
Great post Barb and a great memory of your Dad.
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barbtaub said:
Thanks so much, Paul. The trailer accident was an often-told family story, as if it was just another vacation adventure. It wasn’t until I grew up that I realized how hard it must have been for my parents to buy that little trailer in the first place, and what a huge blow the loss must have been.
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Sue Vincent said:
Sounds like you Dad got it right x
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barbtaub said:
We were so lucky.
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Sue Vincent said:
Yes, I think you were 🙂 ❤
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sknicholls said:
This was just perfect. Those are many of the same values I tried to instill in my kids. (even tho I’m the mom). You always write so eloquently. Especially when you’re serious.
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barbtaub said:
What an incredibly nice thing for you to say! Thanks so much.
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Elyse said:
I remember this post. I loved reading it the first time around and the second.
Your dad sounds very much like mine.
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barbtaub said:
They were part of an amazing generation, and we’re the ones who were lucky enough to benefit from them.
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judithbarrow1 said:
Reblogged this on Barrow Blogs: .
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judithbarrow1 said:
Lovely memories, Barb. I can’t remember my father ever having a one to one conversation with me – or learning anything about him really. You were very lucky – sounds a wonderful man.
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barbtaub said:
I know that every relationship is different, but I have to agree with you–I was very lucky!
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JuliaProofreader said:
How very moving, Barb, thanks for sharing. Your dad sounds like a wonderful man.
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barbtaub said:
Thanks, Julia. I’m probably biased, but I have to agree that he was pretty fabulous.
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Belladonna Took said:
A wise man… 🙂 I try to live by most of these values. I’m not much use when a car breaks down, but fortunately Himself is a grease-to-the-elbows engineer … and I don’t give a very big damn about finding the best price for something if I have to search for it (time is worth more than money!) But look-it-up, always-room-for-one-more, help-where-you-can, don’t-complain-if-you-don’t-vote … all good values.
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barbtaub said:
Actually, I don’t think the particular lessons were nearly as important as the fact that he took the time and interest and love to teach us what was important to him. Thanks so much for your comments.
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joylennick said:
What a Dad to have! An amazing man, and what lucky offspring. Such an interesting and uplifting piece. Thank you.
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barbtaub said:
Thank you! (I’ll always be thrilled with praise for my father…)
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Terry Tyler said:
This is a lovely post, Barb, sorry I didn’t get to read it on ‘the day’. I’m happy to say that I’d say similar things about my dad, too – I’m lucky that he’s still with me.
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barbtaub said:
Thanks, Terry! I hope you and your wonderful dad had a terrific Father’s Day.
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Lorraine Devon Wilke said:
Absolutely beautiful, Barb. I did not know we shared the mystique and madness of “big family.” I am one of eleven, so I can celebrate (commiserate) along with much of your list! For us it was less mechanical work, and more how to grow and maintain a garden, a skill, sadly, I have not done well with throughout my life! But after reading your list, I felt like I knew your father, which made me smile and understand why you have such a sharp observational awareness about what you see, read, and write. Wonderful piece.
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barbtaub said:
I love that you’re from such a big family! Where did you come in the pecking order?
Did you recognize the dinner picture? I swear that could have been us–right down to the kids on the stools at the counter.
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Lorraine Devon Wilke said:
Third oldest, which basically made me a “little mommy” to the slew of sibs that followed. How about you?
Yes, the dinner table image was quite reminiscent, though I remember the dining room in the house at which we were our largest in number was unfathomably small, so the table filled up the entire room. Crazy stuff. The age spread between the oldest and youngest, however, was 20 years, so there was actually little time when everyone was wrapped around that table at the same time. Card tables in the other room… you must have had those!
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barbtaub said:
Many card tables! I’m the second eldest, and the oldest of eight girls. We had an age spread of about 18 years, but there were always all those extra cousins around…
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Lorraine Devon Wilke said:
If you’re a second eldest, then you know the “little mommy” thing! Big families are a fascinating way to grow up, that’s for damn sure. 🙂
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barbtaub said:
I doubt very much that any of my sibs saw me as a ‘little mommy’. In fact, one of my most fervent religious moments was my parents telling me as I headed off to college that they had named me guardian of the whole lot “just in case”. I prayed every night for their continued good health and safety, harassed them about giving up smoking and drinking, and cut out newspaper articles about the benefits of low-cholesterol diets.
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