Do you ever really know what it is you’re talking about with your father? Sure you talk about politics, hear stories of days gone by but what’s really going on is a perpetual bleeding of blood and other body parts that can exhilarate or devastate. Sometimes he’s pouring you another drink, sometimes you’re a spit in the wind. Why the mood swings? Because as John Lennon said, “life is what happens while you’re making other plans” and your existence is a constant reminder of that. To combat this an ancient coalition of dads invented a viagra for the male ego, ‘pride’. Pride, of course, requires something to be proud of which I was only occasionally successful in providing.

Father/son relationships essentially boil down to dads not wanting their sons to be the same idiots they are. Unfortunately biology, namely his genes, make this a dog chasing its own tail scenario. In fact it’s far more likely he grabs that tail and beats your ass with it but nevertheless I digress. My father taught me idealism. Not the kind of pacifist, Che Guevara T-shit wearing, pot smoking, long haired hippy type that for a while I became, but a far more basic and essential idealism. One of right and wrong, one of honesty, one where even if your lifestyle wasn’t clean, damn straight your character was. An idealism that not only had you walking the walk but demanded others walk it too. If you tripped up that would be forgiven (eventually) but if you insisted on playing in the dirt, he’d walk away before you soiled him too.

He would keep lists where he used to work. Three of them to be exact, one white, one grey and a black. The man literally had a pen and sheet of paper in the inside pocket of his suit coat with three columns of names. If you were on the white list you were good as gold. Grey meant he would acknowledge your existence but your standing was tenuous. You could be promoted to the white list or be blacklisted and ignored completely. Ultimately where you landed was up to you. Now lets say you landed on the blacklist, here he would assign a period of time for how long you were to remain there, a sentencing if you will. How long would be determined upon the severity of your infraction. Infractions can range from serious deviousness, tampering with, or in a few cases even outright stealing a client which led to being blacklisted for life, or failing to adequately tip someone which would generally lead to a blacklisting of a week or two.

What allows some of us to get away with this kind of thing? A combination of a few things, first, being genuinely right which most of the time he was. Second, it was funny, the moral court jester. People learn lessons a lot easier when they laugh, even just a little, as opposed to feeling weighed down by the anchor of guilt. This is why many people run away from accountability because being accountable for something requires facing whoever you wronged and that reflection is far more painful, of a much greater exposure than any mirror. After all one can control what a mirror sees. Lastly, getting upset is a way of showing people how much you care and most people don’t like disappointing people who care about them.

Now whether my dad did all these things because it was part of some grand psychological theory of how to deal with people or if rather it was him doing what came naturally is something I’ll never be quite sure of but what I am sure of is that I’m grateful my father gave me a place to belong and on the one year anniversary of his death it was being comfortable within my own skin.