This afternoon I was thinking about water skiing with my family about 15 years ago. My dad was skiing when my mom’s hat flew off. Like he’d done it a hundred times, he snagged the hat, put it on his head and kept on skiing.
It was definitely the coolest thing I’d ever seen my old man do (especially cause Mom’s hat was a big sun bonnet type thing and he just didn’t care - he’s pretty reserved). If one of my friends had done it would’ve been like “cool grab” but to see Dad do it was both unexpected and impressive. I’ve since learned how cool my Dad is in a lot of ways, but when I was 15 he was just the guy who made me mow the lawn and get up for school.
Anyway, anyone else been unexpectedly impressed by their parents that caused you to see them in a different light?
I saw my mom, who is in her early sixties, jump fully clothed into an 8 foot pool and pull my father from the bottom where he was lying unconscious. That was pretty damn cool.
I remember the day my dyed-in-the-wool Luddite dad (no computer ever, cable/VCR/DVD only after everyone in the county already had theirs) went out and got himself a pretty cool new ride.
Also, the day that a rude asshole was throwing pennies at people during a baseball game we were attending (me, hubby, young sons, my parents). Pennies hurt when they are thrown at you. Anyway, hubby says something to the kid, who gives him a look then ignores him. Then, a penny almost hits my kid, and hubby stands up. Punk kid stood up and started to square up, but was taken aback by the look my husband was giving him (it spoke of Death- he used to be a Bad Guy back in the day), and the kid’s friends hauled him away before things escalated. Thing was, I looked back and my 60-something dad was standing up too, right behind my husband. My mom glared at him and said something like “What were you going to do, get in a fight? You haven’t been in a fight since junior high!” “I know,” says my dad, “but you always have to back up your friend’s play.” Wow.
My folks both spend several hours each week helping people who are applying for their citizenship. They’ve been doing this volunteer work for a few years now, and I think it’s a really cool way for them to spend their retirement.
I didn’t realize how cool it was until years later (when I took flying lessons), but I think it’s cool that my mom got her Instrument Flight Instructor, multi-engine, and seaplane ratings.
I saw my dad, in his early 50’s, climb up a tree and hang out of it with one hand and saw off a huge limb with a tiny hand saw with the other hand. Those were some Dad Muscles at work, there!
No one in my family knew I smoked when I was 18 (at least I thought so). Our house was robbed one night and mom and I were sitting on the couch in shock, and my mom - a non smoker - asked if I had a cigarette. I said yeah and I sat and had a smoke with her. A dorky thing to think of now but when I was 18 I thought it was tres cool.
When my parents go back to there native country, they give all their old friends gifts and money. Stuff like clothes, digital cameras, and ipods that are too expensive to buy over there.
It was pretty cool watching them give out the gifts.
My mom, when she was in her early 60’s, borrowing porn from our ‘porn vault’.
It sort of freaked me out, though.
It was even more freaky when she returned them, handed them to my husband, and said, “There’s nothing in any of these movies that I haven’t done. I was hoping for something different! Do you have anything ‘different’?”
These were hardcore porn flicks, too.
Good Christ, I don’t know what the hell type of ‘different’ she meant!
My husband thought that was the coolest thing he’s ever witnessed.
My dad skydives, scuba dives and flies planes. It was normal to me when I was growing up, but now that I’m older I’m kind of like “Hey, that is pretty neat.”
Too many to mention - Mum storming into the local library when I was 11 years old and telling them they had no right to refuse me any book that I wanted to read. My mum hates confrontation, so it was astounding that she yelled at these people because they were trying to stop me from learning stuff. Great lesson.
And at 60+, she’s begun training as a teaching assistant.
Ringing my Dad and telling him I had a problem, I was pregnant. His reply?
“Okay, you’re having a baby. So, what’s this *problem *you were talking about?”
And countless times where idiots have screamed in his face and he’s talked them down and avoided the fight they so desperately wanted.
With all of my aunts, uncles, and grandparents strongly protesting, my folks sold their house and most of their possessions, bought a motor home, and made retirement the adventure they had always dreamed of, rather than a cautious, economically-safe, dull existence. A year later, nobody protests anymore - everyone in the family views my parents as a shining example of how life should be lived.
Surgery. It was weird seeing the guy whom I usually knew from sitting in his underwear watching TV and yelling at me for breaking the window with an errant baseball throw actually just go right in and slice open a human being, remove their appendix, sew them up, then go have a cup of coffee. He could also do that trick where you tie a knot in a piece of thread one-handed inside a matchbox.
My father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease about 26 years ago, when he was in his late 30s. He’s at the point where he can’t walk very well, but some stuff, like going up and down stairs, ping-pong, billiards, and swimming, he’s quite good at. At least usually. My parents have a pool in their backyard, and my father and I were taking my niece swimming while my mom read poolside. I was helping my niece with her ear plugs while my father was swimming laps. All of a sudden, I realize that I don’t hear him swimming anymore, and when I look over to the deep end, I see him curled up at the bottom. Before I know it, my mom has jumped in, fully clothed, shoes, glasses, watch, everything, and is pulling him up. He had stopped breathing, but started again on his own. She says she knew that if she had to wait for the cops to come, it would be too late. She also credits her time as a Girl Scout with giving her the skills. The paramedics took him to the hospital anyway, since they wanted to make sure he would be okay and because we didn’t know, and still don’t know, why he sank, but when he swims now he stays in the shallow end and wears a life jacket.
Oh, and when I was locking up the pool afterwards, a black bear wandered into my parents’ backyard. Nearly shat myself.
My best friend growing up was the son of my father’s best friend. It was a two generation best friend situation. Anyway, one night at a barbecue my dad’s best friend got drunk and went into his angry phase. The guy was a legendarily bad drunk, about 6’6" and 300 pounds of suppressed deep Southern rage, with hamfists the size of volleyballs. My father’s a little shorter than average, and known for his generally mild temperment and affable nature.
Watching the big man go after my dad was like watching my own personal version of Riggs on Murtaugh’s lawn at the end of Lethal Weapon. I’d never directly seen my father do anything violent before; I knew he’d been in the shit and been heinous and theoretically knew his way around killing people if it came down to it, but I didn’t really know. I watched him work the bigger man like a professional bullfighter, and then put him away without a getting a scratch. It wasn’t a beating so much as one of the most effortless and righteous asskickings I have ever seen delivered. Frawress victory. Then, standing over the fallen behemoth with not a drop of sweat on him, my old man turned around to about a dozen stunned onlookers and asked if anyone wanted to go out for ice cream. His voice was steady, and his hands weren’t even trembling. He wiped the blood off his fists with a picnic napkin and bundled the kids off to Baskin-Robbins while the grown-ups cleaned up the mess.
And yes, to this day I still tell my friend that my dad can beat up his dad. He hates it when I do that.
My mom has her master’s in nursing and worked as an OB nurse for years as well as teaching college nursing courses. She was great at nursing and actually treated a couple of my pregnant junior high homeroom classmates (apparently a rowdy bunch). They told me how cool my mom was, even though my mom would have killed me if I were in their shoes. Once I got to high school, we moved to a new town and mom dropped the whole nursing/teaching thing to be a full-time woodworker. The things this woman makes!–bedroom and dining room suites, cradles, poker tables, tv armoires. She designs it all too. It’s amazing and beautiful and better quality than anything you could buy in a store. Her workshop could rival Norm’s from This Old House. She was in her fifties when she started this and is 60 now. I have no idea where she got this skill.
