Category: Dad

My dad has a lot of good stories. This is one of them.

We had mice. And one day I found one of the ‘have a heart’ traps had been triggered. We had caught one of the little guys!! I picked up the trap, brought it to the car, and drove to the cemetary to release him. It was winter at the time and very cold. So when I opened the door to the trap the little mouse didn’t want to come out. It was far warmer inside the trap.

I shook it a little bit, but he clung on. So I shook it a lot and he fell out onto the snow – immediately jumped up, ran towards me, and ran up my pant leg! Just like in the cartoons! I had to grab my knee to keep him from running all the way up! I thought “This doesn’t happen to real people!”

I had to shake my leg like crazy until he came out.

My dad was in his prime play years during the dawn of the science fiction age. Sputnik soared in 1958, and the space race that followed certainly influenced how he entertained himself.

In the early 60’s, when he wasn’t playing the unpolitically correct Cowboys and Indians, my dad remembers playing with a reel to reel audio recorder. His dad has set the equipment up on the porch and made it look like all space age-ish. There were dials all over the floor and panals and general good times. My dad would sit down and play with the stereo pickups to make unique noises.

Although he didn’t mention any direct correlation between his play time and the successful trip of Alan Shepard into space in 1961, I have a good feeling that the two events were not simply coincidental.

My dad has a lot of good stories. Here’s one of them.

When I was a kid we used to play in the woods a lot. One day, there were about eight of us climbing a big tree. And the last one climbing up stepped on a bee hive. He climbed super fast up the rest of that tree.

So there we were. All eight of us high up in the tree, with a swarm of bees circling at the bottom. Two of the braver kids climbed up all the way to the top, and the tree bent way over… and landed the two kids in a brayer patch. They got all cut up. The rest of us didn’t know what to do. So we climbed down through the bee swarm.

Those bees stung the bajeezus out of us. My mom was so angry! When I got home she put me in a tub of ice cold water.

When asked why he didn’t roll on the ground or jump in water once the bees started stinging, my dad replied with some fatherly wisdom:

It’s hard to think rationally when you’re covered with bees.