Happy Birthday, Dad

I yell "I'm not angry! I'm just... emphatic."

I have become my father.

I remember crying when he would try to show me how to clean my room, or do my homework. I was sure he was angry, but now I know, as I bend over my son, whose trying not to cry as I attempt and fail to teach him fractions, he wasn't angry at me. He was just emphatically trying to teach me the concept of multiplication.

"Dad, what does five times five mean?"

"It's five, five times."

"What?"

"It's five, five times"

"Dad, I still don't get it."

"What's not to get?! It's five, five times!?!"

When we would clean our room he would wait until we thought we were finished and then get out the broom. I hated that broom. He would sweep everything out that had been stashed under beds, wipe everything off the tops of our dressers and pull out any clothes that had not been folded, but just stuffed into drawers. He'd tell us to do it again and we would stare at a job that was twice as big as it had been when we first started.

But it didn't matter, I was still his shadow. He would take me to the hanger where he worked and my sister and I would crawl around and play in all of the planes and helicopters. He showed me how to do woodworking projects. I made a baseball bat rack for my brother. We would paint wooden name plates made with his Dremmel tools.

My Dad has been an actor, a rodeo clown, an army guy, an outdoor wilderness man. He's missing the top of his middle finger and has mottled brownish spots up and down his body from both grenade shrapnel and the horns of a bull. When we were little he would turn up his long eye brows at the arch and chase us around the house as a mad professor and we would scream with delight.

He sliced his hand open once. Soaking dishrags with blood, laying on his back, with his hand raised in the air on our back porch I asked him why he wasn't crying, I'd have been crying if I cut my hand like that. "Would crying make it any better?". I was about ten, it was the first time it had occurred to me that crying maybe doesn't make things better, but I quickly disregarded this as crazy talk from a man who was losing a lot of blood.

The funny thing was that crying over a chopped up hand was a waste of time, but my Dad will cry at the drop of hat, if you set dropping your hat to Hallmark commercial music.

He was a hard man to live with and far from perfect, but whenever we sang, or had drawn something, or acted, or wrote I knew even then that he was proud.

Time is such a funhouse mirror. Turning people into things that don't remotely resemble themselves from one moment to the next as you look through it. I remember being scared to death of him, of hearing the coins in his pocket jingle as he came down the stairs. Now I see a big man, who still hugs me so tight my eyes bug out a little bit. I see sour kraut and milktoast. I see a mad professor.

A few months ago Viv asked me how to multiply.

"It's just the amount of times you count by that number."

"What?"

"It's five, five times."