An Early Eulogy For My Dad Because He Can’t Wait

There’s nothing my dad loves more than being the center of attention. He has a zany hat collection and hasn’t left the house without a giant hotdog or an elephant on his head in 30 years. When he’d come to visit me in New York City, he couldn’t get down the block without a tourist stopping him to take a photo with him. Everyone loves a fat man in a hat. He has a busy holiday season playing Santa, he starts growing out his beard in September and he carries candy canes in his pockets, which he buys in bulk from CVS or Walmart the day after Christmas, and hands them out to everyone he passes. On vacations in the Outer Banks, he’d sit at the water’s edge under an umbrella wearing a Santa hat listening to 50’s music on a little transistor radio and grown-ass women would flock to sit on his lap, laughing hysterically while their husbands took their picture with my dad. “Santa’s on vacation!” they’d exclaim. He’d be sure to pinch the women on the ass when they got up, which they also found delightful. 

My dad’s beloved Knights of Columbus hat is one of the few hats in his massive collection that did not move to his retirement home as “they’ve changed the uniform and it’s really pissing me off.” I refrained from replying (audibly) that the Knights of Columbus also pisses me off, but for reasons other than the uniform.

My dad and I have a thorny relationship. We don’t agree on much of anything and have vastly different political and world views. He believes abortion should be illegal but takes no responsibility for his own actions. “Well, I was drunk!” He declared after learning he had a 56-year-old daughter no one knew about after he gifted everyone in our family Ancestry DNA tests. He’s a recovering alcoholic with a history of violence and I didn’t have a good childhood, but I’ve had years of therapy and learned about boundaries. My dad’s health is failing and he doesn’t have much time left. There is nothing my dad loves more than to hear stories about himself, regardless of how unflattering they are. He is overjoyed any time I write about him, and he is a living treasure trove of stories, most of which I have been saving for his eulogy, but because he loves to hear about himself so much I will share them now, mostly as a gift to him. 

My dad is the luckiest person who has ever lived. I am no longer a practicing Catholic, but I am convinced my dad has multiple spiritual entities watching over him because there is no way he would be alive and thriving if he didn’t. My dad has fallen ass-backwards into every opportunity he’s been given, which of course has to do with being a white man in America, but I think there’s more to it than that. He once duct taped four yard sticks together and attached a flashlight with another piece of sticky duct tape to the end to retrieve a ring I’d dropped down the gutter of a bar in Washington, D.C. It took him two tries to locate and retrieve the ring, and when he pulled it out of the gutter he declared it was St. Anthony who had found it and I’m not convinced he was wrong.

He drove his Datsun under the hood of a truck on the highway outside of Dallas, Texas and lived, but he continued to drive the smashed-in Datsun for years, even shipping it to Rota, Spain when my family got stationed there because of his career in the Navy. My dad grew up poor and never, ever threw anything away. Not even a car with the entire front end smashed in. Every time we drove through the gates of the Naval base in the smashed in Datsun, the La Guardia would gather around to examine the wrecked car, marveling that it still ran, and that my dad, an officer in the Navy, drove it.

Because my dad could not throw anything away, he used his engineering skills to concoct ways to keep things working. Just before my parents finally agreed it was time for them to move to an assisted living facility, my dad had devised a way to hoist himself out of his recliner by fashioning a pulley system with various ropes and bungee cords attached to the garage door handle. Almost everything in our house was held together with duct tape. My dad would never dream of spending money on something like hiring a tow-truck if he could do it himself. Every time my Chevette broke down in high school, my dad would tether it to the back of the smashed in Datsun and haul me through Fairfax, Virginia to his shyster mechanic, yelling out the window at me not to put my foot on the break goddamnit, as people honked and yelled at him that he was crazy and that it was dangerous, and if there had been cell phones back then I’m sure they would have all called the cops. 

He has the worst instincts of any person you’ve ever met. 

In 2015, he decided ISIS was everywhere and he was going to buy a gun despite the fact that he lived in a quiet, affluent suburb in Northern Virginia and didn’t lock his doors. He left the patio door wide open day and night, and he was surprised, one evening, to discover a family of raccoons sitting beside him nibbling the cat food while he was watching Touched by an Angel. He’d recently nearly stabbed himself in the ass when he sat on the knife he kept tucked in the side of his recliner so it was handy for slicing his night cheese. If someone were to break into his house, he’d be more likely to aim a Triscuit box at them than his gun because the gun would be stuffed down in the cushions under the mail, all his device chargers, and his snacks. After I wrote about my dad and his gun, he heard me pull up in the driveway and he hid behind a pillar in his kitchen and aimed a Triscuit box at me when I walked in the door. 

He ate an opened can of sour cream and onion dip that he’d left sitting on the counter for a month, even though it smelled and tasted bad, and he had at least three unopened cans on his garage shelves, and he ended up in the hospital with botulism. But if you suggest he put the meat-lovers pizza in the fridge rather than leave it on the counter he’ll object. “It won’t hurt anything,” he’d claim, having learned absolutely nothing from his stint with botulism. He fries two pounds of bacon at a time and eats half of it and keeps the other half on a jar of peanut butter on the counter so it’s convenient whenever he needs a snack. “What’s that?” people will ask, pointing to the congealed lump of bacon resting on the jar of peanut butter. “That’s my dad’s extra bacon, help yourself,” we’d say. One night he fell asleep while eating a large cellophane bag of Runts candies, and he woke up with little candy bananas, oranges, and limes stuck all over his naked body.

My dad’s extra bacon, which he keeps on the counter on top of the Skippy so it’s handy.

My dad loves to laugh. Everything makes him laugh, but he’s got a 15-second delay. Once the punchline hits home, his enormous belly starts to shake and when he really gets going he wheezes so hard you think he is dying in front of your eyes. My friends all adore my dad and still talk about his laugh. 

He is extremely ticklish. When we were kids he’d play a game called The Bumblebee – it went like this:

(Singing)

The bumblebee came out of the barn

With LOADS of honey under his arm 

And went…  BUZZ

He’d be holding us down while he sang this song and the buzz was when he’d drill his meaty finger into our armpit with such force we’d bruise like a pear but we absolutely loved it. When we’d bumblebee him back he’d jump and wriggle and laugh so hard his enormous belly would shake and it was terrifying and awesome. One time when I was in high school, we attended a fancy Christmas concert at Ford’s Theater and my dad was bored out of his mind until some lady started playing a loot, which apparently tickled his funny bone and he started his wheeze-laugh and he couldn’t stop laughing and it was contagious and everyone in the theater started laughing and it was such a distraction we almost got kicked out and the family that went with us to the concert refused to speak with him again. Not everyone loves my dad.

When I visited him last year at his new retirement home, my husband and I rescued a woman who was stranded in the parking lot because she’d bitten off more than she could chew trying to get her steps in so we gave her a ride back on her walker and she asked who we were there to see and I told her I was there to visit my parents, perhaps she’d seen my dad, he was a big fat guy who looks like Santa and wears a lot of hats and she pursed her lips and looked liked she’d just sucked a lemon. “Not everyone loves my dad,” I ventured, and she responded “Our theory is he didn’t get enough attention when he was a child,” and I said, “Well, he was one of eleven children, so you are probably right.” 

What’s crazy is how many people do love my dad. People he’s sponsored in AA credit my dad for saving their lives, and I believe it’s true, but he also has a Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick way with women. It’s a feminist’s nightmare. 

I have never met a woman my dad has not sexually harassed, including my elementary school nurse who had to count the offering in the rectory with my dad on Sundays and hated my dad’s chain smoking so much she reported him to his commanding officer (for smoking, not sexual harassment) and of course nothing was done about it because people made allowances for my dad, always. When he filled out the form to get a security clearance in the Navy he marked that he’d been arrested but never convicted for drunk driving and the officer administering the paperwork told my dad he was going to step outside for a few minutes and when he came back there should be a blank space where my dad’s admission had been. My dad does not believe in white privilege, by the way. That’s a myth, he claims. 

Some of my earliest memories of my dad are him walking into a party and yelling at whichever woman he laid eyes on first to “Go get naked in the bedroom, I’ll be there in five minutes!” and people absolutely fell over themselves in glee. Every time I met his secretary she was sitting in his lap. We moved to Fort Worth, Texas after he left the Navy the first time (he later got called back to active duty thanks to the Reagan administration, which he still thinks was fabulous) so he could work at Miller Brewing Company, which was very convenient for him since he was an alcoholic, and my parents would host massive pool parties in our backyard, and us kids would run around completely feral, shepherding fresh beers and blenders of strawberry daiquiris out to the adults who partied their asses off, poolside, and inevitably someone would nearly drown but they never did. Our neighbor kid, Ronnie, who couldn’t swim, walked from the shallow end to the deep end and was hanging out drowning on the bottom of the pool for some time before anyone noticed him and hauled him out and all the adults called him an asshole and continued with the party. 

My dad loves to host. It doesn’t matter if he’s never met you, if you were passing through town he’d expect you to stay in his house and he’d cook you a steak. He would never, ever allow anyone to eat or drink alone. The thought of someone taking a taxi to or from the airport was unimaginable to him, he was going to drive you, goddamnit. 

We had massive Easter parties where my dad would hide hundreds of candy-filled plastic eggs in the yard while the kids were penned up in the house until we were unleashed and it was total mayhem. At Christmas, my parents hosted an epic party every year and my dad rigged a bar to a tractor and we’d all go Christmas caroling but we only made it to a few houses because everyone was wasted, and the party would return to our house and continue ‘til the wee hours.

When it was time to leave a party my dad was usually so drunk he’d have to lie on the floor like the giant after Jack cut down the beanstalk until he’d suddenly pull himself up, grunting and groaning and grab a beer for the road and drive us home. I spent a fair amount of time telling my therapist how terrified I was for my life when I was a child, and I was not exaggerating. When I was seven years old I devised a test to see how drunk my dad was when he was driving so I would know how scared I needed to be. It involved me asking him to solve math equations, but I was terrible at math so the questions had to be simple enough for me to know the answers and my dad was an engineer. It was an imperfect test. There are stories about my dad that are decidedly not funny, I grew up with violence and neglect. 

But let’s not dwell on those times right now. 

My dad prefers not to be encumbered by clothing. Naked is preferable, but short of that he’d wear his towel. His towel was a brown crushed velvet skirt-like garment that fastened below his enormous belly with an insufficient tab of Velcro. When his first towel — which lasted through the entirety of the 70s — was worn to tattered rags, he replaced it with a terrycloth version, featuring a big front pocket over his balls that was convenient for holding his smokes. He wore his towel everywhere — to the bank, the grocery store, to pick up me and my friends from the mall or the movies, his rocks glass of gin resting comfortably on the dashboard. When we lived in Spain, he decided his underwear was just as good as a bathing suit so he’d waddle all over town in his underwear and Jesus sandals. He’d ride his moped through the tiny cobblestone Spanish streets wearing nothing but his underwear and Jesus sandals, my little sister, sporting only a diaper, wedged between his enormous belly and the handlebars and they’d visit all his favorite little bars where he’d drink beers or Sherry with the local fishermen and my sister would dig tiny snails out of their shells with a little toothpick and eat them. They were happy as clams. 

When I was helping my parents move out of their home of 30-plus years in Northern Virginia, my mom and I were going through their old photo albums and I pulled out a photo of my dad sitting on a couch wearing his towel, smoking a cigarette, surrounded by women dressed in high-necked, long-sleeved blouses and modest skirts with pantyhose and sensible shoes. “Wasn’t this a business trip dad took to New Zealand?” I asked my mom. “Yes,” she replied. 

My dad sporting his towel on a business trip to New Zealand. I love how the woman on the left is extra-dressed in her neck scarf.

One time when I was in middle school a strange man broke into my room. I heard him pushing open the door, and as he approached my bed I was confused, which soon gave way to terror, and at first I was too frozen in fear to scream, but once I did find my voice I screamed so loudly the paperboy down the street heard me. My dad came running into my room, naked, of course because he slept in the nude, and all I could do was scream “there’s a guy in my room” over and over and my dad chased the guy down the street even though it was snowing and he was completely naked and the guy got away so my dad walked home, naked, in the snow, and called the cops and when the cops got there my dad said “This guy sure had some balls,” while his own balls were hanging in the breeze. 

The only form of exercise my dad got was “walking” our dog, Abercrombie. Every night my dad would get on his moped and he and Abercrombie would tool through the neighborhood, Abercrombie, a black lab, also ungovernable, would run wild alongside my dad, pissing and pooping in all the neighbor’s bushes while my dad puttered along beside him on the moped. They were the scourge of Truro. My family was frequently featured in the Neighborhood Watch section of the Truro Trails newsletter. 

My dad has a terrible startle reflex. You simply must not surprise him. He once got stung by a bee and he ran around in circles in the yard flailing his arms all over before crashing through the screen door, tearing it off its hinges. 

“Say, if you’ve got a few minutes why don’t you get up on the roof and clear some of those branches off the skylight,” my dad would suggest to anyone who walked through the front door, and almost everyone would. When I was a kid he’d make me and my little brother climb a too-short ladder to get on the roof to clean the gutters with promises to “catch” us on the way down.  

No one loves a prank more than my dad. One time in middle school I was hosting a sleepover with all my friends and we were watching Silent Night Deadly Night, an 80’s slasher flick about an ax-murdering Santa, and a quarter of the way through the movie my dad came barrelling down the stairs dressed in a Santa suit, roaring, and wielding an ax and it scared my little brother so badly he crapped his pants. My friends still talk about it. Later in high school my friends and I dressed up like Michael Myers from Halloween and stood in a clearing in the woods scaring the shit out of everyone who drove by, but first we started in our own neighborhood, and my dad sat at the kitchen table with his gin shaking his head. “You are all going to get arrested,” he said, but before we took the show on the road he helped us make a bloody knife out of a stick and a can of red paint he had in the garage. The entire Fairfax Police Department showed up in Mantua to arrest us. 

My dad is a terrible driver, even now that he’s sober. He’s constantly fiddling with four devices at a time, veering into other lanes, laying on the horn if someone tries to get to a parking spot before he does. I stopped riding in the car with him years ago, but had an occasion when I needed to ride with him when I was helping them move out of their home. He took a call from an old friend which distracted him so much he ran a mail truck off the road, then tried to peel an orange while running a red light and I took his keys away from him and said he was finished driving forever but my dad is ungovernable, and bought an 8-person SUV when he moved to his retirement home in California. His recent health problems caused his doctor to put a hold on his driving license and yesterday my dad informed me that he was interested in joining Hospice because he thought it would mean he could game the system and get around needing a medical dispensation from his current doctor to drive. “That’s not the way Hospice works,” I told him, but I can tell he doesn’t believe me and that he’s still scheming a way to drive again. 

When we were visiting my parents at their new retirement home over Christmas my dad showed us a video of the Christmas play he was in. He was thrilled to be cast as the lead. The video shows him dressed in a Santa suit, going 100mph on his scooter before he takes a turn too fast and crashes into a pole. The audio on the video goes from oohs and ahhs of delight to gasps of horror as the lady filming the crash drops the camera to run and help my dad. I posted the video to my Instagram and read my dad all the comments and he was absolutely thrilled with all the attention. “Say Jen, why don’t you tell them about the time I dressed up in a diaper and shot arrows at your sister during her Valentine’s party,” he suggested, his enormous belly already shaking with laughter.

My dad still loves that story.

Watch out, my dad will convince you to climb a ladder and there’s nothing you can do about it.