Like My Dad

Last night I realized that I’m more like my Dad than I ever imagined.

I work with a group of people who would spend their last ten bucks on magic beans. They don’t live paycheck to paycheck, or even day to day; they live second to second. “Oh, I found a dime on the floor,” they’d exclaim, while at the same moment making plans to spend it. Most people see the paycheck at the end of the week as the means to pay the coming week’s bills, but these guys think their paycheck is magic money that falls from the sky to pay for lottery tickets and cigarettes. The future? BAH! Who cares about tomorrow!

Last night a younger guy who works for me asked to leave an hour early. He does this every time I work with him, as if that extra hour will give him more time to do something more productive than smoke weed, which is always his true intention. I really didn’t care if he left early; the guy wasn’t accomplishing much anyway. But as we talked he mentioned that his shoulder hurt. “Why don’t you go see a doctor?” I asked, puzzled.

His reply? “I can’t afford it.”

I stared at him incredulously until he muttered “whut?” I began to explain to him that he doesn’t work for the things in his life, how he wastes his time getting high and blowing his paltry earnings on Pick 3 tickets, pot, and cigarettes. I tried to explain that leaving early is symptomatic of a larger problem: the idea that the future does not need to be prepared for or planned. You can’t just live second to second in life, I said, because you never know when you’re going to need to really need something. As I lectured him, a co-worker nearby, listening intently, started laughing. When I asked what he was laughing about, he said that he thought of me as everyone’s father.

Those words stopped me dead. I immediately began to think back to all of those times growing up when my Dad would yell at me about not saving money, not checking my oil, not being responsible with credit cards and my credit score. I remember chafing at the reminders, my face scrunched up in a displeased frown much like the fellow employee I was lecturing at that moment. I had the whole “the son becomes the father” moment that I thought would never happen to me. No, not to me.

I told the kid to get the hell away from me. I needed some time to think.

The Sons Of My Friend

You might categorize my relationship with my father as “cool.” Not cool as in Fonzie cool. I mean cool as in chilly. Or not warm. Nonexistent, even. 

Lots of kids have relationships like that with their parents. It’s part of the natural awkwardness that invades the teen years, destroying the fragile bonds that were sewn before puberty. In my case, my Dad simply wasn’t interested in my sister or myself. We were financial burdens, obligations to be handled like the phone bill or the mortgage.

So you can imagine my surprise when I went over to my old friend Scott’s house tonight and saw firsthand his relationship with his two boys. Scott was always the most open and frank guy among our small group of friends, but I never imagined he would be so good at raising kids until I had the chance to talk with his boys. Or, rather, to watch them interact with each other. The walls that I once had with my father were not apparent between them, replaced instead by honesty and open dialogue.

I would never have wanted a conversation with my Dad about my masturbation habits, but there was Scott talking about it with his kids in obvious terms in front of me, a relative stranger. Scott seemed to be able to share his deepest secrets with his sons, and they seemed willing and eager to share theirs with him. Like Scott, I’m pretty blunt and to-the-point, and seeing their interaction gave me a glimpse of the type of relationship I would have built with my own kids had life offered the chance to me.

Besides that, it also made me feel good about the choices I’ve made in my friends. If one can be judged by the children one produces, then my friends are among the greatest people ever known. They have produced children who are warm, intelligent, thoughtful, inquisitive (an important one!), and funny. My friends have some pretty amazing kids, and it tells me something about those people I’ve chosen to populate my life. Through the children of my friends, I’ve learned that I’m a very lucky guy, indeed.