In honor of Dad's 75th birthday

I was 33 years old, walking from the house to the shop on a warm spring day, the moment when I realized that I knew my parents when they were my age. I stopped mid-stride and calculated the years while the sun warmed my back and the profoundness of my thought altered reality and possibly opened a portal in the space-time continuum.

I turned 10 the year Dad turned 33. My parents were building a house across town. My older brother was one year away from becoming a teen-aged jerk, a more advanced, hormone-fueled version of himself as a pre-teen jerk.

I was well past the years of baby teeth falling out, those times when Dad, a 6-foot-4 athletic man, would bend his face close to mine as he carefully tied dental floss around my tiny loose tooth with the almost elegant fingers on his giant, gentle hands. With the string ends tied to tooth and a doorknob, the intense concentration would slip away as his giant grin took over his face inches from mine hypnotizing the anticipation of pain from me with his warmth and his eyes, like blue diamonds.

“Are you ready?” he’d ask, grasping my tiny shoulders. Yes. And at his quick nod my brother would slam the door. As the tooth rattled across the floor, he would lead the loud cheers like we had just scored the winning touch down.

At 10 and 12 years old, my older brother and I were deemed old enough to stay at home alone while our parents were across town building our new house. I would guess now that we were more trouble than we were worth, and in that era of landlines-only they had a special phone service set up to ring at both houses so we could call them.

One day, we found two tubes of stretchy fabric, cut-off remnants of pants our mother had made into shorts. We each grabbed a stretchy tube and slid our legs inside. The wild hopping turned into a race through the house with the finish line a 2-foot gap between the recliners in the living room. I surged ahead in the last hop and my brother responded with an unsportsmanlike shove that sent me headfirst into the stereo — one of the old-kind that played record albums, weighed roughly a half-ton and lacked childproof rounding to the fiercely pointed wooden corners.

The amount of blood spouting from my forehead rivaled a town square fountain, so our parents had to be called home. They were not particularly happy, especially since by the time they got home, the bleeding had pretty much stopped.

Dad leaned in close to examine the wound while brother and I lied extravagantly about how it happened. Dad’s faced eased into that blue-eyed, full-face smile that made everything all right, pronounced my wound non-life-threatening and kissed the top of my head. Mother, frowning, grabbed my arm and hauled me into the bathroom for a surgical scrub, her parenting skills being a study in opposites from Dad’s.

I was told I couldn’t wash my hair for at least a week so the wound would have time to heal together. After seven days of summer fun, sweat and dirt culminating in a heat and dust festival at one of Dad’s softball/beer-drinking league games, I told Dad my forehead was throbbing. He bent me backward, looked cross-eyed at my forehead and poured beer on my wound.

I swore, and he bellowed a laugh from the bottom of his guts up and told me the beer rinse would hold me over till I got home to shower the stink off me. Mother disapproved at him from across the crowd of post-game celebrating teammates and family. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and pulled me tight to his side, laughing again as I swiped some of the dirt and beer into his shirt.

When my husband and I arrive at Dad’s house for his 75th birthday, we will be greeted with a chaos of dogs, hugs, kisses and handshakes with family — and neighbors who are like family. Dad will wrap his arms around me for a giant hug, then cradle my face in his hands and smile that heart-wide-open smile — deep laugh lines, blue-diamond eyes and all — and tell me how happy he is to see me.

I will feel at home and special right there in a way I feel nowhere else on earth.

——

I don’t care what tone you use, calling me a daddy’s girl is always a compliment at [email protected].