Playing chess with Dad – I was probably about 17. The game was going very poorly for me, and at one point I spent 9 or 10 minutes staring at the board, trying to come up with a move that would turn things around. Finally, my father says, “Sometimes the best move is just to knock the board over and say ‘oops.’”
I wound up using that as my senior quote in my high school yearbook.
Playing poker last year with my little brother, age 10; Dad is on the other side of the room, reading the paper. As it happens, we get all-in and my brother wins the hand, and with it all the chips. At this point he laughs uproariously, falls off his chair, then rolls around on the floor and laughs some more.
Grandad used to get home real, real tired; often he’d be so tired he skipped lunch, got a lie-down and took his lunch about mid-afternoon snack time (gramps worked in City Hall, so he was home by 3pm, which is late for lunch but still ok). His brother, a doctor, determined that this was related to low blood pressure. Uncle would take Gramps’ BP every time they met, which was pretty much daily.
One day, Uncle takes Gramps’ pressure. Takes it again. Switches arms. Takes it. And says “Ignacio?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got bad news.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You’re clinically dead.”
“Ah, guess that explains why I am so tired.”
The story got around, and the head cardiologist at the hospital (who musn’t have had enough close encounters with my uncle before) claimed that the numbers Uncle was giving were impossible. So Uncle asked Gramps whether he could bring a guest, sure you can.
So Big Doctor comes in one day, takes Gramps’ BP, retakes it, starts taking off the pressure cuff, realizes what he’s doing, turns to Uncle and says “you know, I couldn’t believe it! But with these values it’s amazing he can stand up, much less walk.”
Uncle “why would I need to exaggerate, reality trumps imagination every time.”
Whenever I would catch my dad looking at me in a weird way (usually after I’d said/done something stupid, you know how it is) I would always ask “What are you looking at?” He would always reply with “Not much.” It’s gotten to the point where if I still involuntarily ask him that, I’ll say “Not much” right along with him because I know it’ll be his answer.
My dad’s also a great storyteller. I know a lot of his stories by heart now, but whenever he starts to go into one I already know I never say anything because I love hearing him tell them. And every now and then he pulls one out that I’ve never heard before.
I remember when I was about 11 I was visiting my father and we we’re walking around in the airport and he said “you might not like girls yet, but one day you will be staring at their asses and wanting to fuck them.” As I grew older I realized he was right.
I’m sorry to say that there’s no witty or interesting answer to this. I just thought of it when I first started using bulletin boards many years ago, and it’s stuck.
I grew up in the '60s and I’m still influenced by those wonderful times, and I think that it just sounds right for me. It came to me in a flash of inspiration - a Kubla Khan moment, when the heavens opened, and the words came dripping like honey into my sparkling eyes…
This isn’t my dad, but my best friend’s father, Jim. My friend was the youngest of 7 kids – and a surprise to boot – so her dad was quite a bit older than most dads in my circle. Jim was typically very reserved, and stern without being cold. While I called my friend’s mom Liz, Jim was always “Mr. Smith.” Quite formal.
When I was 16, I was invited by their family to go with them to Oahu, and stay for a week. Needless to say, I had a blast, and a highlight was this:
My friend and I came in after snorkeling one afternoon, and sat down to play gin rummy with Jim. We started talking about where the game’s name came from, and then Jim (who I believe was a wee bit tipsy at the time) said:
“Girls, NEVER get hammered on gin. It makes your head feel like it’s coming off at the roots, and your mouth feel like the Russian cavalry held practice in it on horses with diarrhea.”
Holy crap, I laughed so hard I cried, and it was YEARS before I could get through that quote without dying of laughter halfway through. Still can’t, sometimes.
I’ve mentioned this around here before, but I just love this memory. My parents are devout Catholics. Like, mass-every-day devout. So, we were driving somewhere in a rural area one day. Along the side of the road, someone had erected a series of signs with the Hail Mary on them. The first sign said “Hail Mary, full of grace, The Lord is with you”. The next one said “Blessed are you among women”, and so on. There were maybe five or six little signs, spread out over a few hundred yards. We all observed a moment of silence until, a few seconds after we passed the last sign, my dad chimed in, “Burma Shave!” I laughed until my sides hurt.
When my sister and I were about 14 and 12, respectively, our dad took us on a trip to Washington, D.C. We were walking through some tourist place and my dad was about 10 feet ahead of us when a man approached and asked if he’d like to donate money “to help the retarded children.”
Without breaking stride, he answered, “Got two of my own.” My sister and I were in convulsions.
We were a lot closer when I was younger. At that time, we had birds and he was fretting because he couldn’t find the millet sprays for them, and he accused me of taking them. “What would I want with the millet sprays?” “Well, you might be off eating them yourself, in a corner somewhere!” The answer was immediate and toned so comically that I still giggle to think about it.
When he saw my Doomokun plush he said, wide-eyed, “What is that, a biscuit?” I thought that was really adorable.
The funniest thing that comes to mind that my father said was when my nephew was about 20 months, and they were coming over to visit. My mother said something about not having toddler-proofed the living room, and Dad replied, “Maybe he won’t go in there.”
My real father died when I was five and my mom married a joker that we were with for about 10 years. After we left him, at my behest, she hooked up with one of the coolest people on the world. He is a master electrician and worked for the county for 30 years and is retired now so he just helps people with home projects and does part time work to make a little wine money. I asked him one time about diaelectric grease, which is used mostly for automotive applications but has industrial uses as well, Anyway I asked him if it would insulate the ends of spark plug wires to keep the spark from jumping to the exhaust manifolds, which are very close to the wires, and as it’s high voltage without many amps its not too sketchy to work around. I asked if it was capable of completely insulating the spark and he tells me with a dead pan look on his face, You’ve heard of lightning right? That shit will pulse through a hundred foot tree in a about a second. Nothing is dialectric, dummy, if you put enough power to something it will burn a 2 by 4 like it was a tooth pick. I about passed out I was laughing so hard, he was dead serious as he used to work on the high tension wires you see when your traveling though the countryside and you have to ground yourself while your working on them or it you will burn you up like a stick match. This is probably a lot more info than a lot of you guys need, but still, at heart it’s the same thing as the rest of you are talikng about. My face hurts from laughing about it now.
P.S. The motor was a 460 in Lincoln town car. Beautiful engines those are.
I don’t know the context, as I only walked into the room in time for this line of an argument between my mom and dad, but dad was walking off saying “Fine. FINE. I’LL JUST BUILD A DURN ROBOT.” Later I saw him with his bike, a socket wrench, and a sheet of plywood walking towards the shed.
No clue what it was about, but so freaking hilarious.
When I was in college, I was home on a break and my parents had just taken a cruise. They got back, I saw my dad first, and said “How was the cruise?”.
His response? “Great! I got your mom pregnant!”
Admittedly, I was horrified at first since I didn’t think my parents ever had sex :eek: , but then I cracked up since I knew she’d had her tubes tied when I was like 11 and my dad’s tone was just so jovial and proud.
