Day of the Dads

  • [If you're looking for the I WANNA DO LASER contest results -- they're a-coming, nerds, chillax. Gimme time to get my poll in order.]

    It sounds like a horror movie, doesn’t it? THE DAY OF THE DADS. Tremble as the DADS walk the earth! The Night of the Living DADS! The Dawn of the DADS! It’s 28 DADS Later!

    I dunno.

    What I’m saying is, Happy Father’s Day.

    My own father, well, he’s off tracking game and taking down the Celestial Elk in his own Happy Hunting Ground, but as usual on this day — and on many days — I am reminded of him, reminded of stories that live on despite him, reminded of legacy and family and love and loss and all that crazy stuff.

    I told eleven stories of him here last year.

    And then eight stories (and one more) in December.

    On this one, without getting too crazy, I’ll add just one more story to the bunch.

    Came a time that I shot a hole in our kitchen ceiling with a .22 rifle.

    I got home from school and neither my mother or father were home, and yet in the driveway sat a strange car. Further, our front door was open. Something felt off, not quite right, so being the gunslinger hero that I was (ahem), I went inside and grabbed a gun off the rack in the living room.

    Now, in the house, it was a point that most of the guns were unloaded. But! The house was home to a few key locations, and in these locations waited loaded guns. Just in case. My parents’ bedroom was just such a place: a loaded Ruger Blackhawk hung on the back of the door, a loaded Smith & Wesson Model 29A (blued, eight inch barrel) .44 Magnum (the Dirty Harry gun) cooled its grips under the bed, and a .45 ACP chilled out in the sock drawer.

    The gun rack in the living room was not such a key location, though. No loaded guns there. Or so I was to understand. I entered the house, crept in, snatched up a .22 rifle, and started to scope out the downstairs. I eased upstairs, and sneaked from room to room, thinking… shit, I don’t know what. Was I planning on scaring someone away? Would I confront a robber with my unloaded .22 bee-stinger and save the day? Who knows? What ended up happening instead was that I saw out the window that whoever was here was just here to visit our whitetail deer. They were just enjoying our deer farm, as many had in the past (they just stopped by, as if we were a zoo), and then drove away while I was upstairs.

    Ahhh. Deep breath. Good.

    I went back downstairs.

    I stood in the doorway of the kitchen, rifle in hand.

    And somehow — not really sure how, or why — I bumped the trigger.

    The gun snapped off a shot and put a little .22-sized hole right near our light fixture.

    I didn’t actually shit or piss my boy panties, but I did have about six little heart attacks and at least one stroke, I think.

    I knew I was dead. Like, dead-dead. Fucking double-dog-dead. It would’ve been better, I figured, if that bullet had ricocheted off the light fixture and perforated my throat. I checked out the hole, and dang was it tiny. And it was in really dark paneling (when I was a kid, you pretty much paneled over everything; I’m surprised we didn’t have a dog covered in paneling). Frankly, you couldn’t see it. It was damn near invisible.

    I put the gun away.

    I stabbed an adrenalin shot into my chest to make sure I was still alive.

    And then I pretended that nothing happened.

    Mom came back — reason the door was open was, I guess she had taken a quick drive to my grandmother’s which was like, 30 seconds up the road.

    Dad came home — still nothing, no problem.

    Dinner.

    No problem.

    Evening.

    No problem. Oh, except –

    I was passing through downstairs, about to head outside, and my father stopped me. He said, “Here, I want to show you something.” And then he takes me into the kitchen, and with one of his stubby, callused fingers, points out the hole. And he begins to, CSI-style, dissect the scene and tell me exactly how I shot a hole in the ceiling. He knew where I was standing. He knew the gun I used. He knew how I was holding the gun.

    And the whole time, he was remarkably calm. Not the state I expected, by the way. It was all the more sinister. His relative pacifism here was terrifying me all the more. Like a wolf silently stalking prey.

    He said, “I’ll have to check the roof, make sure you didn’t put a hole there. Otherwise, it’ll leak.”

    I blinked. He didn’t seem mad.

    I asked to confirm, maybe a mistake: “Are you mad?”

    He shook his head and laughed.

    “No,” he said. “I did shit like this all the time when I was a kid.”

    And that was the end of that.

    So, Dad, thanks for not stringing me up by my balls that day.

    (That one rifle was loaded for one day, by the way, in a contravention of normal house rules; I guess he was using it that morning to take out crows or gophers or something at like, 3AM or some shit.)

    Dad

    Happy Father’s Day, and I’ll have a glass of blackberry brandy in your honor. And tomorrow begins a novel that, in many ways, is very much about him. That’s my first real answer to that most critical question. “What’s it about?” Well, it’s about my Dad, and it’s about the legacy of stories. With my own telltale twists, of course. This being fiction I’m writing, not a goddamn memoir.

    Take time if you choose, pop into comments, tell a story about your father. Or, if you’re a father, feel free to talk about your kids. What we have of our family always are the stories, so, share ‘em if you got ‘em.

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    June 20th, 2010 | terribleminds | 6 Comments

About The Author

ChuckWendig

Chuck Wendig is equal parts novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. He is the author of the novels DOUBLE DEAD, BLACKBIRDS, and MOCKINGBIRD. In addition, he's got a metric boatload of writing-related e-books available, including the popular 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER. He currently lives in the wilds of Pennsyltucky with wife, dog, and newborn progeny.

6 Responses and Counting...

  • terribleminds 06.20.2010

    (Julie Summerell writes a great post over here about her Dad)

    http://jasummerell.com/2010/06/20/happy-fathers-day/

  • Rick Carroll

    That is freaking amazing, Chuck. You’re dad was The Man.

    I get jealous sometimes, not having any stories about my father beyond a half remembered car accident when I was a kid (everyone survived, just one of the few things I remember). Stories about my stepdad are of the “blame-my-childhood-for-everything-waah-fucking-waah” variety, so I don’t recount them often. I know your time with your dad wasn’t always roses, but dude, it all sounds gold.

    “No,” he said. “I did shit like this all the time when I was a kid.”

    Classic.

  • Julie

    Thanks.

    The more I read of your dad the more I wish I could have met him. Less than perfect, as are all of us, but so substantial.

    My dad.

    One of the strongest memories I have of him is the day we were driving home from Sesame Place, and we were flying down the highway. My father was the male Ellie Mae Clampett, and he swerved to avoid two box tortoises that were trying to cross. He hit the hazards and pulled over. I turned around in the shotgun seat, because back then we were allowed as kids to ride shotgun, and I watched him use his whole body to wave big rigs into the next lane so they wouldn’t crush those tortoises.

    He scooped up both of them, and they came home to live with us.

    I remember thinking he was going to get himself killed.

    Two weeks ago I created skid marks up on the highway when I pulled hard to the side of the road, hitting my hazards while stopping. I *did* check for traffic before I got out, and as I got out and went to run for the box tortoise I saw that the guy who had been four-wheeling along the side of the road had beaten me to it. I yelled, “Did you get him?” He yelled, “Yep! He’s fine!”

    I’ve realized through the years that the examples our parents provide for us can be far more important than any words they ever speak.

  • Shoe

    My dad is pretty cool. He’s into a lot of things that I am too, and I typically figure this out years after I get into said things. I’m into trains. He’s into trains! I’m into old photography and cameras. He collects antique cameras! I’m into glassworking. He does stained glass! He’s the reason I got into unicorns, even if he did later ‘get saved’ and renounce his unicorn-lovin’ ways.

    For all the fights, and the times he can be cold and grumpy and mean, Da is really, really freaking’ nice to me. He helps me out, he’s sweet, ahe won’t let me be horrible to myself even when I really want to. He’s funny, too. Once in a while he’ll just be totally ridiculous and weird, and I love it. He’s smart. He’s spent his entire life working to help people, and I think that’s totally cool.

    The thing I life best? No matter how much of a jerk he is, he always says sorry later, and admits he was wrong. Unlike my mom (who likes to invent a new past and new memories when the old ones show her in a bad life), he’s told me things he did when I was little, things I don’t even remember, and said sorry for them. He’s told me he was ashamed of flaws he had, said he wasn’t the best new parents, and expressed deep remorse over things I’d have never known to call him on.
    To me, that kind of accountability? That’s really exceptional, especially in the society we live in. That’s my favourite thing about him.

    Plus he likes trains.

  • Kate Haggard

    Funny, I just posted up my own story about Dad. Fictional version of his own story since he so hates attention.

    You know, i could go on and on about all the lessons of hard work and sacrifice and yadda yadda yadda. But what I really owe to my father is growing up surrounded by outrageous stories. Maybe he was just fucking with me, but at one time he had me believing that I was the direct descendant of an Indian Princess (hey, my 4 year old self didn’t know there was no such thing), that the pantry was haunted with a ghost that would eat me if I went in there at night, and that I had been born with a tail.

    I found it hard to believe that this man that worked so hard to keep my childhood magical, greeted me every morning with a Donald Duck voice, and wore those awful denim shorts with a polyester trim bearing topless hula girls was a soldier. Heck, I wouldn’t have believed he got the Purple Heart if I haven’t seen myself.

    Your Dad might just be the polar opposite of mine. And they all deserve love.

  • Dawn

    It’s a day late. Today, my dad had surgery to remove his gall bladder. Yesterday, I meant to call him, but he’s a few hours ahead of me and I get up rather late these days. The guilt is weighing down on me. But that’s a different story.

    I have so many stories to choose from with my dad, including a few gun and hunting related ones of my own – like the time I watched him puke his guts up after dressing a dear because he accidentally nicked the stomach.

    There isn’t any one story to share (at least that I’m willing to write about in public, such as the time he gave me advice on how to keep a husband…), but more snapshots that definitely have made me who I am today.

    He built me a tree house in the apple orchard…
    Sundays in my youth were spent watching Kung Fu with him…
    One said Sunday a bat flew into the house then flew out again – he wouldn’t let me keep it though…
    He tanned my hide only once when I broke a gun-safety rule…
    He taught me how to play chess, poker and pool, stating that those were the only games I’d ever need to learn to survive in life – and he was right…
    He sold some stock so that I could go to a Talented and Gifted summer camp…
    He cried when my twin brothers were born…
    He passed out at the sight of blood when he went in to see my son after his heart surgery…
    He cried when my son died…
    He cried when my mom died…
    He remembers to laugh and live despite everything…

    I love my dad. He means the world to me.

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