63 things I love about my dad

Before I go on and on about my Dad, can I first say how much I love this picture? I love it for so many reasons, not the least of which is that it always gets me humming, "Come on Eileen," as my sister and I are dressed straight out of the not-yet-existent Dexy's Midnight Runners video. Secondly, I love that we are painting in our dress shoes. Mom says that's because we were poor then and we only had one pair of shoes. (By the way, notice how my sister's are black patent leather? Oh, how I envied that black patent leather. Though I now absolutely adore red shoes, I had major issues, particularly a few years later, with a pair of red unscuffable sandals my mom bought for me. I really wanted black patent leather; she told me maybe for my next pair. I then went on a mission, constantly trying to scuff my unscuffable sandals. Darn it, if it wasn't true, I really couldn't scuff those sandals...) Finally, I love this picture because we are painting the garage the same color it already was - brown. Brown, it seemed, was the color of my youth. Brown eyes, brown hair, brown car, brown house, brown swing set, Brownies... We even befriended a neighbor we referred to as "The Brown Car Lady." (We liked her because she would let us stand on her kitchen table while she painted our toenails.) Anyway, ironically, I just bought new sheets. Wanna guess what color? Brown. To match my brown leather couch. Oh, how Erik mocked me, but truly, the ensemble really goes...

Today, however, is not about me, or my shoes, or my sheets. Today is about my Dad. A textbook Daddy's Girl, I adore my Dad. Not only do I look just like him, I act a lot like him. This is not always a good thing, as he is rather eccentric and would have trouble navigating the real world without the help of my down-to-earth Mom. Truth be told, I'm sometimes even sad for my poor Dad as he is trapped in a sort of unfortunate time warp. He is the perfect fifties dad, patiently plugging away at work to provide for his family (in fact, my Mom has often said he will "work until he dies"). All he asks for in exchange is a little respect - some peace and quiet when he gets home, the big piece of fish at dinner, the remote control at night. He does pretty well with the fish and the remote, but man, does he have very little peace. My Dad is in some way at the center of every family drama. I believe this is because he is, like our president, "the Decider." We used to vote on family issues, but whenever he was outvoted, he would declare that he got six votes. Because his vote is omnipotent, he is constantly lobbied by opposing forces. I remember once we asked him who his favorite child was. He very easily answered "Kevin" because at the time, Kevin could barely talk.

In addition to being the most coveted ally, my Dad is a safe place. I feel like I could tell him anything and he wouldn't be fazed. He generally responds to life's calamities with pensive silence and later, his checkbook. Although he is Catholic to his core, he's never once told his children he was "disappointed" in them. In many ways, he epitomizes forgiveness. But it could be denial. Either way, it's very Catholic.

I actually find my Dad both entertaining and inspiring. He's a self made man who is unintentionally hilarious. He can't help but be anything other than himself. And so today, on his 63rd birthday, I give you 63 reasons why I love my Dad:

1. He didn't get mad when I sold all his Cokes for a quarter at my lemonade stand. In fact, he thought it was funny.
   
2. He bites his tongue when he is concentrating.
3. He can't resist a bargain. Just ask the driver of the meat truck who came across my dad washing his own car and changing his own oil filter. That lucky driver sold my dad so many frozen entrees (chicken cordon bleu - yum) that Mom was furious as her freezer was already full.
4. He buys cheap gas. I do too. It's a waste of time and energy, but we both can't bear to pay even a penny more elsewhere.
   
5. He tips 20%, but not because he wants to. This is in honor of the decade I spent waiting tables. He still calculates the tip before tax and rounds down a dollar rather than up, but believe me, this is a big improvement.
   
6. Though he has a reputation for being cheap (an uncle of mine once described him as "tighter than a donkey's asshole facing uphill against the wind"), he's also quite generous. He buys animals through the heifer project and has his church set up on auto pay.
7. He spoils his children. He supports us in whatever harebrained schemes we may propose. I think he secretly wishes he hadn't spoiled his children, as now we are in many ways paralyzed financially, but I don't think he could have been any other kind of Dad.
8. He encourages us to save for the future. Sadly, we rarely do it. I worry about a future without my Dad. It will be an ugly place.
   
9. He once replaced the seven dollars I lost on the Wildwood Boardwalk when, at the age of six, I stashed them down my shirt. I had seen Laverne & Shirley keep their money that way, I just never realized they were sticking it in their bras. This is actually my earliest money memory which, if you believe Suze Orman, set the tone for my life. "Go ahead and be careless," I learned, "Daddy will fix it." Though Suze may find fault with this memory, I treasure it. What I take away from it is that my Dad thinks it's cute when I'm dumb.
   
10. He says he hates the animals but he's often seen napping with the cats and I think he secretly likes them.

11. He enjoys reenacting things he saw on TV. The most hilarious thing I can recall was his acting out a Friends episode. He kept standing from one side to the other and changing voices to represent the different characters.
12. He is equally enthusiastic when reading children's books. He's always quite animated.
13. In fact, he's great with children. He's not afraid to play. I especially enjoyed riding with him on my nieces' see-saw recently.
    
14. He's athletic. Can't wait for that apparently latent gene to kick in. Too bad this athleticism most commonly manifests itself in the form of the Thomas Family Death March. (Cuzen Bob, can you say "Philadelphia in the summertime"?) My Dad is so athletic, he once ran a marathon. His feet turned blue from the dye in his sneakers and his toenails later fell off, but he finished.
    
15. He's quiet, except for when he's not. When pushed over the edge, Dad whips out with what we call "The Border Voice." This voice was born at the Canadian border but has been used in any number of locales (often airports or shopping malls, or on the phone with customer service reps or lawyers...). It's actually quite effective because it is so out of character.
    
16. He also makes really girlie noises, like right before he dives into a cold pool.
    
17. He won't fix his ingrown toenails. I know, as I inherited them, that it is a painful condition with a simple cure. Instead, he prefers to periodically soak and pick at his swollen big toes.
18. He loves his mother. He calls her every night. Never mind that she lives on the East Coast and it is 10 pm by the time she hears from him (she naps in preparation), they both love it. I worry for him, as a world without his mother will be as dark for him as my world will be without my Dad.
    
19. He loves my mother. I love to see them holding hands.
    
20. When my mom is not around to take care of him, he makes jelly sandwiches and peanut butter sandwiches, but seldom peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
21. He whistles. His whistle is part of his vocabulary. When he whistles, that generally means that a patient has died. He longs to write a book about all he has seen with his patients, but I have had trouble communicating to him that the whistle doesn't translate well to the page.
    
22. He's wicked smart. He's got a photographic memory that was apparently on a recessive gene, as none of his children got it.
23. He keeps up on his profession and isn't afraid to try new things. As a result, he's saved a lot of lives and alienated a number of less adequate doctors.
    
24. He is adored by his patients. I used to be jealous of them, particularly because they were so much more lovable than his children. And we were never considered sick because we were never dying. Even the need for stitches was negotiable if my Dad was in charge. Now I finally get it. I realize that as much as my Dad could love his patients because they were good, he still loved his kids, even when they were bad.
    
25. He dresses up at parties for his patients like Big Bird or Santa Claus. The kids are generally young enough that they don't get the connection and they sadly report, "Oh, Dr. Thomas, you just missed Big Bird." Though this past Christmas they did mention that last year's Santa was black...
26. He once met Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers is even cooler than you think he is. Just check out this blog.
    
27. He was a good baby. The shape of his head proves it. Below is an illustration I made for an unpublished book I wrote that shows an aerial view of the "good baby head." It is flattened on the back side as he seldom cried and therefore laid flat on his back during his skull's most formative days. (By the way, Bob Barker himself once held up this illustration to his studio audience and announced that I was
    "very talented, ladies and gentlemen.") Take note also of the completely ineffective comb over.





28. He finally cut this comb over off. It happened sometime after a patient of his told him his hair was "pretty" and another commented it was "weird."
29. He loves mountains. And churches. And trees. Anyone who's sat through his vacation photos knows this. He also loves scenic routes. To this day I associate the signs of a squiggly arrow with the motion of food moving backwards up your digestive tract.
    
30. He would patiently re-teach me to swim each summer when we lived in Virginia. They say swimming is like riding a bike, you never forget, but I was also really slow to figure out the bike riding.
    
31. When we finally moved to California, he took great care of our pool, though it was never easy. We had a tree in the backyard he nicknamed "Old Yosemite" that dropped needles like you wouldn't believe. And then there was the cheap bubble wrap cover that constantly shed its shredded bubbles as they scraped against the flagstone border. But Dad had worked hard for his pool and he would not be denied the pleasure of using it. He had been told it couldn't be built (too small a yard, too narrow an access) but he just hired a smaller bulldozer.
    
32. He's a picky eater. He refers to artichokes and other green things as "poison" and claims he's allergic to curry. Actually, he just hates curry (and root beer) cuz it reminds him of the time he spent on a boat in the service.
33. He dances at weddings.
34. He doesn't mind losing at board games. Especially when playing with the grandkids.
35. He's actually sort of immature. He thinks it's funny to show my mom three fingers and invite her to "read between the lines."
    
36. He used to let me sit on his lap and steer the car up the drive way.
37. He gives A frame hugs. I think they're a little weird and distant, but now I think it'd be wrong if he did anything else.
38. He loves to eat off other people's plates. One of Erik's favorite memories of my Dad took place when they went to a sports bar while my mom and I shopped. Erik ordered a sandwich which he unwittingly shared with my Dad. They also enjoyed the free peanuts, discarding the shells on the ground. My Dad, reportedly, particularly enjoyed crunching them with his feet.
39. He likes chick flicks and he's not ashamed to admit it.
40. He once drove our car through a river. It was probably just a creek, but I remember it seemed impassable and was probably not the wisest path. Still, he went for it.
    
41. He always eats Cheerios with half a banana for breakfast.
42. He loves to point out things he's reading in the newspaper and read them aloud.

43. I love that when he visits other people's houses, he finds a quiet spot, reads their periodicals and falls asleep.
44. He's a strong supporter of his college, Villanova. He still wears his school ring and he's always singing the fight song, "V for Villanova, V for Victory..."
    
45. He was inspired to become a doctor after a house call from a doctor during his childhood. Like his pool, he faced many obstacles on his path to this goal, but he got it done.
46. He can sleep and watch TV at the same time. Anyone who doubts this can just try changing the channel. He will instantly wake up.
    
47. He can nap anywhere. And he does.
48. He wears funky ties to work. He particularly likes his Sponge Bob Square Tie.
    
49. He calls us "sports fans," though none of us are.
50. He has a sense of humor about his insanity. He appreciated it when I referred to him and my brother as "two nuts in a sack."
51. He's a great writer. He doesn't always have the chance to show it. He once wrote Erik a phenomenal letter of recommendation. And he writes a decent family Christmas letter when I am on strike.
    
52. He was an Eagle Scout and an altar boy, which, of course, makes his children major geek spawn.
    
53. And yet, he used to be a rebel. He likes to show us the scars on his knuckles that he claims he got from the angry nuns at his Catholic school. Alternatively, his sisters say the scars are from the time he broke a window with his fist after they'd locked him out. He also fondly recalls smoking cigarettes and reading comic books while his sisters were forced to clean his room.
    
54. In many ways, he still is a rebel. He once refused to pay all the parking tickets he'd racked up at the Naval Base - until the parking authorities scraped off his stickers. This was another incident where I saw the Border Voice in action.
    
55. Like my Mom, he also stop smoking.
56. He has really neat eyes. They're hazel with little flecks of blue and brown in them.
57. He doesn't drink water, I think ever. Certainly not in restaurants, which is great for me as I'm always one glass ahead of the waitress.
58. He's an optimist. I surely didn't inherit that.

59. He likes to coast down hills. It's annoying sometimes (especially when he claims he's saving gas - the poor man's hybrid) but it can also be fun. He used to take us down a particularly steep street in San Diego (B Street, I think) and it felt just like a roller coaster.
    
60. In fact, he loves to drive. This is not always a good thing. He's crashed a rental car in Italy, ran a red light in San Diego, and, of course, whenever he's in charge of family road trips, the bathroom stops are notoriously infrequent. ("Next town," he says. "That wasn't a town," he says, as we finally pass a place with buildings...) But because he likes to drive, I do get to see him and my mother on a fairly regular basis, despite the fact that I live two states away.
61. He hates to wait. He'll take a right at a red light even if it's the wrong way.
62. He loves his little MG. He considers it a classic even though a mouse once considered it home and one of the cats (presumably Ginger) once peed on the gear shift.
    
63. He's always turning off the heat. This actually drives everyone crazy, especially if he accidentally lets Ginger the pee cat into your room at night. I believe it isn't so accidental, this passing of the cat. I wouldn't be surprised if he thinks that people who sleep with the heat on deserve to have their things peed on.
64. Two memorable quotes from Sundays: Either "nobody in this car needs a donut" or "I'm saving you calories" as he takes a big bite out of your donut. Now, whenever I drive past the donut shop, I often hear myself thinking, "nobody in this car needs a donut."

Happy birthday, Dad.