I Sure Am Going to Miss My Dad

Tags

dads, family, fatherhood, my life, Stephen Roth, tribute

Dad talking business; me playing with my stuffed giraffe.

Some time in the summer of 1977, when I was a six-year-old happily growing up in LaGrange, Georgia, my mom took me to a fish and chips place for lunch. She ordered me a basket of hush puppies and explained that my dad’s job was going to be transferred to the headquarters of Milliken & Co., and that he would be moving to Spartanburg, South Carolina.

“Well,” I said after some thought. “I sure am going to miss him!”

My mother then went on to explain that she and I would also be moving with him to Spartanburg, and the strange reality of an impending uprooting, away from all my friends and everything else I had ever known, slowly set into my six-year-old mind. There would be other moves, all of them between South Carolina and Georgia, in my growing-up years as my father’s career evolved. It was nothing compared with Dad’s own Army childhood, which took his family from Washington, D.C., to Germany to Seattle to San Francisco, as well as some other places in between that escape my memory now. My dad, like me, was an only child.

Today, I’m reminded of my naïve reaction to my mom’s big news of so long ago. “I sure am going to miss him!” I had said in the carefree, confident tone of a kid whose dad was smart and strong and probably going to be around forever. Today, I say the same thing, but in a different tone. Art Roth Jr. passed away early Monday morning, October 14, after more than a year battling bladder cancer in the same tenacious way he took on everything. This foe, however, proved even more persistent and formidable than Dad, who had survived two tours in Vietnam and later three firings in his long career as a brilliant turnaround artist for several different companies. Each time he experienced a setback, my dad came back stronger and more successful than before. Nothing, it seemed, could keep him down. It would be the same way with cancer, we all felt, until the last two months, when tests showed it had expanded to other parts of his body. “Like an unstoppable rebel force,” as Robert De Niro’s character described his late mother’s cancer in Meet the Parents. It was an uncomfortably funny line in the movie, perhaps because the description is so very true.

My dad traveled a lot when I was growing up. I used to entertain my friends and their parents with a Ricky Nelson song I had heard on television (“He’s a traveling man and he’s made a lot of stops all over the world.”) My friends could relate – most of their dads worked for the same company and also traveled frequently. Still, my dad was around for almost every big moment of my childhood. He was at every birthday, every school event. He helped me learn how to swim, helped me craft a Pinewood Derby racer from a block of pine, and taught me how to throw a football with a tight spiral. When I jumped into the corner of the Country Club pool and busted open my chin at age 3, my dad was just arriving from work to have lunch with us. He drove me and Mom to the hospital, all the while insisting to me that the cut wasn’t all that bad, and how tough I was being about it. Years later, when I went to retrieve a ball underneath my aunt and uncle’s deck and was stung by about nine wasps, my dad marveled at how fast I shot out from under the deck and into the swimming pool a few feet away. “Butch, that was probably the most perfect dive you’ve ever made,” he told me, and that made me feel proud.

He was a fun dad, but he could intimidate when necessary. I feared him a little, knowing he’d survived West Point and Vietnam, and now had an important job with one of the largest companies in the South. He did not need to scream or yell, because he possessed a cold, withering stare. I remember being trapped in that gaze for several long minutes after being caught lying about my grades. It was worse than any spanking or grounding I could have ever received, and I retreated as soon as I could to our living room piano, where I was more than happy to do my mandatory 30 minutes of practice. “Very nice playing,” Dad said when I was done, and my fear subsided.

As it is with a lot of fathers and sons, we grew closer as I got older. My dad never pushed me to get into sports, but I know he was pleased when I began taking an interest in football, tennis and golf. Some of my favorite memories involve watching sports with Dad, and I have ticket stubs to football and baseball games from Atlanta to San Francisco because of him. In 2009, he took me to the Augusta National for the Masters, and it was like getting to visit heaven for three days. Not just golf heaven, but actual heaven, with almost every blade of grass pristinely manicured. I opened a box of Dad’s things last night and there, atop all his Masters tickets dating back to 1975, was a spectator guide to the 2009 tournament. I’d like to think he saved it because it was the only tournament he and I attended together.

Perhaps my dad’s greatest gifts to me were always letting me know that I was loved and supporting my dreams, even if they weren’t what he would have envisioned. Every phone conversation we had ended with an “I love you.” He had a great way of building me up and making me feel good about myself even in the worst moments. He was always optimistic and excited about what I was doing, whether it was taking a $16,000 job as a reporter in Mexico, Mo., or getting to work for Hallmark Cards. “Butch,” he told me when I took the low-paying reporter job, “I’ll bet you’re going to be making $36,000 a year within five years.” He was wrong, but it was a nice thing to say.

He wasn’t a hugger. His way of affection was tossing the football, or playing “mercy,” or rubbing my back as we watched a game together, usually with a bowl of popcorn nearby. I miss those times most of all, feeling his hand giving the back of my neck a tight squeeze, and me trying not to let on that it hurt a little. I’m going to miss that. I’m going to miss my dad.

A Boy and His Wolf

Tags

bad guys, bedtime, big bad wolf, boys, dads, evil, fatherhood, humor, three little pigs

Most of us are fascinated by bad guys. Doesn’t matter if it’s Lex Luthor or Saddam Hussein or Bernie Madoff. We are repulsed by their terrible acts but we also wonder what causes them to behave that way. Maybe we recognize in ourselves some flaw or weakness that, if provoked, would turn us into villains, too? We are taught from an early age to believe there is some shred of humanity in even the worst of us, which make explain why evildoers are so interesting. Even the devil was once an angel. Bad guys have layers, man.

For my three-year-old, the ultimate bad guy is that infamous threat to homeowners everywhere, the Big Bad Wolf. My son finds him terrifying but also strangely alluring. As a result, the Golden Books version of The Three Little Pigs is well-worn in our household, as is the satirical True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, which tells the wolf’s side of how things went down.

This fascination has taken over bedtime. “Tell me about the Big Bad Wolf,” my son says as I tuck him into his toddler bed and turn out the light. “Tell me how the Big Bad Wolf come to our house.”

“Well, okay,” I reply, getting on my knees so I can look into his gleaming eyes. He wants to hear a story I concocted in which the Big Bad Wolf emerges from the woods behind our house and attempts to, well, blow our place down. There are several opportunities in the story for my son and I to recite the “I’ll huff and I’ll puff…” line, and, in the end, our heroic Australian Shepherd Keiko runs out of the house and chases the evil wolf out of the backyard, across the creek, through the woods and into the next county. “And,” I always conclude, “we never saw the Big Bad Wolf ever again.”

“Little pig, little pig… Let me come in!”

I was pretty proud when I came up with this tale. Even a relatively clueless dad like me knows the story must end with the wolf vanquished, as opposed to going on some lunatic rampage through our neighborhood. Also, in making our dog the hero, the story seems realistic. My three-year-old would never buy into the idea that his parents, who struggle each morning just to pull him out of his Jake and the Neverland Pirates pajamas, would ever summon the nerve to defeat the Big Bad Wolf. Keiko, however, seems resourceful (and mean) enough to pull something like that off.

Now, being a word person, I enjoy telling a good story. Still, there’s a certain point when one tires of telling the same story over and over, night after night, just as I am sure that Bruce Springsteen sometimes tires of playing “Born to Run,” at every show, no matter how proud he may be of its creation. I told The Big Bad Wolf Comes to Our House every night for about a month, waiting for my boy to tire of the subject. Instead, his obsession grew.

“Tell me,” he growled each night in a way that was intended to sound just like the arch enemy himself, “about the BIG, BAD WOLF!”

So I mixed it up a little, inventing a story called The Big Bad Wolf Comes to Grandma’s House, which ends with the wolf falling into a big pot of scalding water. I also devised a gentler story about my son as a zookeeper who takes care of the Big Bad Wolf and eventually befriends him. There were other variations as well and, like most sequels, all were inferior to my original wolf story. But I had to add some new wrinkles to our bedtime routine just to keep from going completely insane.

So now I have a problem. We are six months into the Big Bad Wolf craze with no end in sight. I am officially out of wolf stories. And I am weary of recycling the old ones. I am tired of describing the wolf as having “beady green eyes that glow in the night,” and possessing “teeth as sharp as scissors.”

Now, I could easily tell my son that Daddy is a little sick of these stories about the Big Bad Wolf, and couldn’t we just read a nice book like Green Eggs & Ham instead? But what would that say about me, the self-fashioned “creative” dad? The one who invents stories on the spot to captivate and inspire his young son, even when that dad is so exhausted some nights that he finds himself sprawled next to the toddler bed, patting his child’s back and murmuring something about a wolf and the dog and Grandma and, are we getting sleepy yet? Want Daddy to go get you a cup of milk?

I know someday my son will tire of the Big Bad Wolf and will probably move on to something mind-numbing like Chuggington or the Power Rangers. One day, I’ll ask him if he wants to hear a story about the Big Bad Wolf, and he’ll say, “No. I want a story about Lightning McQueen.” And I’ll feel sad that one door of his toddlerhood has closed and another one has opened.

But, damn, right now I am sick of that psychopathic wolf. I wish he would go away, like he eventually does in all my made-up stories.