HAPPY 92nd BIRTHDAY, DAD!

FROM PAT, AUGUST 2008:

For my 75th birthday, Bun asked our daughters to write about a memory they had about growing up with me. I was pleased with their restraint. I thought surely Peggy would put in the time I bloodied her nose. She was about ten then and had been in the living room practicing playing the piano. I was resting in the next room with a headache so bad I had to keep my eyes closed since any amount of light was painful. To make matters worse, each key stroke Peggy made on the piano felt like a drill bit boring into my skull. For the record, I yelled for Peg to stop playing a couple times before finally crawling out of bed and feeling my way down the hall to where she sat at the piano. I meant to pull her hands away from the piano keys but my hand slipped and I bopped her on the nose which began to bleed. I felt terrible. 

Peg used that bloody nose against me for the next 20 years. “Can I have the car tonight?” she’d asked at age 16. “No,” I’d say. “Remember the time you gave me a bloody nose?” she’d say. Okay take it!” I’d say. Peggy has gone on to be a successful business person. I think the bloody nose helped her achieve success.

FROM PEG — HERE'S WHAT I ACTUALLY WROTE ABOUT:

The Benefit of the Doubt

I had a wild imagination as a kid. This was a great thing when it was daylight. I could entertain myself for hours with a mud puddle and a stick. But once darkness fell it was a different story. I was consistently screaming from the bedroom I shared with my two sisters, the trolls, for Dad to come chase away Bloody Mary. My sisters would screech at me to shut up and come beat on me if I didn’t. I realize now I should have been more afraid of them than any ghost staring out at me from a full-length mirror. 

There’s no doubt I inherited the imagination gene from Dad. Mom understood this and therefore repeatedly punished Dad by forcing him to get up from bed to see what I was screaming about.

No matter how outlandish my latest rant was, Dad always gave me the benefit of the doubt. This meant a lot to me because I tended to create a lot of doubt in people and rarely reaped a benefit.

Night after night Dad searched each corner of our bedroom until I was satisfied it was clear of ghosts, demons, and spiders. Afterwards he would take my side agains my sisters when I begged for the light to be left on.

Unfortunately, Dad wasn’t always readily available. I remember walking home after a Girl Scouts meeting one stormy night when I was in the fourth grade. My route required me to walk past a field of tall grass. This was always a spine-tingling event for me, especially after dark when it became difficult to spot where the axe murderer was crouched and waiting to leap out of me.

On this particular night, my attention was fixed on what looked to be an old coffin perched on the rocky ground beneath a dead tree in the middle of the field. As horrified as I was, I was able to reason that this field must have once been a cemetery.

It was difficult to see in the fading light and pouring rain, but there was no mistaking that whatever was inside the coffin was trying to get out. The lid creaked and shifted, rose slightly, then fell again. I stood in the road unable to look away from the scene before me. Suddenly a strong gust of wind whipped open the coffin’s lid. In that same moment, a bolt of lightning lit up the night sky revealing the atrocity within.

Until this point, I had been successfully practicing he stationary panic, but the sight of the dirty skull staring coldly up from the coffin’s interior drained my last ounce of restraint and I took off down the road in a full-bore-linear panic. I was home in a flash, hysterically recanting my experience to my parents and demanding they call a priest. 

Instead, Dad decided he wanted to witness this phenomenon for himself. A person doesn’t get too many opportunities to see the undead, he told me.

I was astonished when he insisted I go with him. Up until this point in my life I had considered Dad to be an intelligent person. There was no way I was going back. I had barely escaped with my life!

Dad reached out and took my hand. Sobbing, I locked my knees and frantically tried to pull away. It was a losing battle. Dad simply lifted his arm and up I came from the floor. I balled myself around his arm. Mom dropped a flashlight into Dad’s free hand and told us to be careful. I couldn’t believe she would so easily send me to certain death. I mean, I knew money was tight but couldn’t they just ship me off to an orphanage?

Out into the storm we went. I remained coiled around Dad’s arm, screaming and begging him to come to his senses. I would be a better kid, I promised. I would squish potato bugs in the garden, pick up horse manure, and even stop demanding he ghost-bust my bedroom at night. But Dad didn’t miss a beat and eventually we reached the field. Dad stopped alongside the road and pointed the flashlight toward the coffin under the tree. I dropped my feet to the ground, hoping the surprise move would cause him to loosen his grip on my hand long enough for me to break free and make a run for it. That didn’t happen.

After a moment, Dad started walking again. Inconceivably, he stepped into the field and headed straight for the coffin. I was dragged along with him despite the repertoire of gymnastic moves I performed in my attempt to escape from his grip on my hand.

As we neared the gaping coffin I closed my eyes. It occurred to me that this would be a good time to pray and I began reciting the only prayer I knew: “Bless us, oh Lord, and please send gifts,” I yelled. 

“Open your eyes, Piggly,” Dad said. I ignored him. “Come on, Peg, open your eyes.”

Eventually I did as I was told. Remarkably, my prayer had worked! The coffin was gone. God had turned it into an old refrigerator box with its lid blowing wildly in the wind. And the skull inside was transformed into an odd-shaped rock resting at the head of the box.

“It worked," I shouted.

“What worked?” Dad asked.

“Praying,” I answered and began skipping back toward the road home.

Dad, Thanks for all the memories and have a great 75th year!

Love, Peg

HERE'S KELLY'S BIRTHDAY MEMORY FOR DAD:

The best teachers I know teach with stories, and my dad is the quintessential teacher. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to grow up with a dad who was a storyteller. I thought every family sat around the dinner table every night after supper and told stories for hours on end. It was the best part of the day. Most of those stories were about friends and relatives that I knew well and would later go on to be published in books and magazines. As a kid, all I knew was these were our family stories, and we would laugh and laugh until creamed corn came out our noses.

But our education didn’t end at the supper table. Dad likes ideas, all kinds of ides, great and small, and he likes to share them and debate them. I clearly remember being seven years old and driving back to our home in Spokane on a Sunday night after our usual weekend at Grandma’s farm near Sandpoint, Idaho. Dad decided to explain atomic theory to me. Even by that young age I had perfected the technique of solemnly nodding and saying “wow!” And “really?” at the appropriate pauses when I had absolutely no idea what someone was talking about (a skill that has served me well throughout my life.) I was flattered that Dad would explain such difficult stuff to me, but to be honest, the only thing that really stuck was his analogy of atoms to the sand in my sandbox. What happens when you split atoms? KABOOM! So by inference in my seven-year-old brain, what happens when you accidentally step on a piece of sand wrong and maybe even break it?!! Let’s just say I have been suspicious of sand and sandboxes ever since.

Then there was the summer we spent at Grandma’s farm when I was almost four. When it was time to go home, I couldn’t find my beloved tomcat, Poe, anywhere. Dad finally told me that he’d seen Poe out by the highway hitching a ride to Canada with a trucker. That darn disloyal cat! It was just like him, too. I still picture him clear as a bell standing by the highway with his gray cat thump stuck out and his food dish tied to a bandana over his furry shoulder. I’ve been a dog person ever since. I was forty-two before it dawned on me what had really happened to Poe. I called Dad and said, “Did Poe get run over by a semi?” Sadly he confirmed my suspicion, but it didn’t really matter anymore. In my mind’s eye, Poe will always be sipping catnip tea in British Columbia and saying, “meow-ay.”

Teaching is in Dad’s blood. His mom (my Grandma DeMers) was a one-room schoolhouse teacher for years, and she taught everyone she met until the day she died. I don’t think she could help it. I remember that when we sent our childhood scrawls/letters to Grandma, we would get them back neatly corrected in red pencil along with the charming letters Grandma wrote back to us in her perfect handwriting.

Unlike Dad, Grandma DeMers did not teach with stories — she taught with quizzes. We all had to be at our academic best when Grandma came to dinner. You’d be minding your own business enjoying your mashed potatoes, and out of the blue, Grandma would say, “Kelly, did the girl lay or lie down on the bed?” Or “What’s 3/32 divided by 4?” It actually was a lot of fun, although usually somewhat humbling fun. However, what was pure fun was when she would manage to catch her English professor/writer son in a rare grammatical error. I’m sure the ladies at St. Joseph’s Bingo Night heard about it for months; I know we did. Dad always took it in stride. In fact, I think he threw in a few grammatical goofs from time to time just for the joy it gave Grandma.

Of course, humor writers are used to not being taken seriously (ha!), but it’s too bad really — humor writers teach us some of the most important lessons with their funny stories: like life doesn’t always make sense; it is better to laugh than to cry or at least laugh through the tears; and finally that God must have a wonderful sense of humor. And that’s the beauty of stories, especially funny stories told by your dad. They make life better, happier, and truer. I had the best childhood a girl could ask for.

Happy Birthday, Dad! Love, Kelly

FROM SHANNON, OUR SISTER WHO LIVES IN BRITISH COLUMBIA (WITH POE THE HITCHHIKING CAT):

My dad has always been one of my heroes. Not because he is a well known writer, but because he puts his whole spirit into whatever he does whether it’s trying to teach his daughters what a gerund is at the dinner table, finding the leak in the sprinkler system, picking huckleberries, or writing. 

It has been wonderful hearing from some of the people who have also been touched by Dad’s spirit through his writing. 

Papa McManus

Swirls of smoke from corn cob pipe

Surround the Kennedy rocker

Where a man sits writing

A humorous story

Salted

With laughter and Scotch

Lips sip golden Scotch

Through yellow pipe 

Stains that salt

His teeth, like rocks

They stand and tell stories

That he writes

Fingers always writing

They flow like Scotch

Making a story 

That pipes

Laughter from man in rocker

His mustache smoke salted.

Happy 75th birthday, Dad! Love Shannon

AND FROM THE YOUNGEST TROLL, ERIN:

Going exploring meant going deep into the wilderness and finding beautiful huckleberries and the perfect hidden fishing holes. 

We would leave from our house in Spokane and head to Idaho in the early morning hours. We’d take a break in Sandpoint for breakfast. Fearing it would probably be the last meal of my life, and fearing in a few hours we would be lost in the thick woods of Idaho or Canada, I would order the lumberjack special.

Driving up thin trails or as my Dad would call them, “logging roads”, we would eventually, and I mean eventually, find the perfect huckleberry and the best fishing hole. Even when I knew we were lost, my dad always had the great ability to pretend he knew exactly where we were going. After a long day we would head back toward civilization. As a child I would use the term “Are we there yet?” and Dad would say, “Just around a couple of bends.”

Nevertheless, we always had a lot of laughs even if we were lost!

Happy Birthday, I love you, Dad!  Erin

LAST BUT NOT LEAST, HERE'S BUN:

When Pat turns 75 this month, I will too, even though my birthday isn’t until December, such is the nature of our connection. We have been together for 56 years. When I was thinking about marrying, I would picture us sitting in two rocking chairs on the porch watching the sunset when we were old. Well, we’re too busy to be old, let alone rocking on the porch. Maybe one of these days we’ll get another rocking chair, but the porch and getting old will have to wait.

May we have many more years together. Much love and happy birthday, Pat. 

Mom and Dad at his 75th Birthday!