The Reader

VOCAL: Dads Are No Joke

“That shark is the size of our driveway”. The very words that my Dad whispered to me in a packed movie threatre in July of 1975. I was only five but he took me to see JAWS with him. I was mesmerized by the whole thing. Later in the movie, he whispered, “That shark is made of rubber”, because he didn’t want me to be scared. And that’s the kind of Dad he was.

My father was a firefighter: three days on, three days off, three nights on, three nights off. Each shift twelve hours. He worked a lot of overtime and it was hard to keep track of his schedule. My mother also worked and didn’t always keep up with his days on the calendar. I was born in 1970 and my Dad retired in 1988. I remember the house phone ringing in the middle of the night: that big, black, clunky rotary phone ringing at 3:00 AM in my parents’ room. I could hear it from my room. I remember jumping out of bed and running in to find my mother sitting up and talking to someone, many times. She was always pale and wide awake, her legs dangling off the side of the bed, the black receiver making her face appear that much more blanched.

We were one of the lucky families: he always came home. We were lucky that he had the kind of captain that would call when he was stuck in a fire all night long. This was a time without cell phones, a time when this captain had to get out a handwritten phone list and call each wife on that list, knowing that before delivering the good news that her husband was (currently) alive, he would be scaring her and the children. My father never wanted that responsibility. He remained a front lines firefighter, a grunt if you will, his entire career.

My father was a big guy, and had a reputation as a tough S.O.B, but those who were closest to him knew that he had an affable side. He was, in fact, pretty quiet. His hobbies were gardening, feeding the birds, playing with the dog, and reading. A LOT of reading. To this day he’s the only person I’ve known who could read up to five books at one time and know the plot and characters of all of them, without mixing them up. He’d leave one at work, one in his car, one on the porch, one in the den and one in the bedroom. This was a man who was not much of a student. He didn’t care for sitting still while being lectured to.

Both of my parents were big readers, but it was my Dad who really got me into reading. When I hit puberty, he let me start reading his books after he’d finished them and he started with “Carrie” by Stephen King. As I got older, I enjoyed reading something he had just finished and we would talk for hours about the plot. I remember the moment I finished “Presumed Innocent” by Scott Turow. I closed the book and ran into the den yelling, “Holy shit !”, and he laughed and said, “I know!”.

My favorite moments with my Dad happened on the rare Sundays that he had off from work. On those days, I’d awake to the very loud garage door opening right under my room. I knew he was getting his Honda Goldwing motorcycle out, and pretty soon we’d be going for a ride. Every week we would stop at a used book shop about twenty minutes from our house called “Books by the Falls”. It as an old warehouse across the street from a river with waterfalls. The soft-spoken man who owned it, Ron, knew us and he loved to talk with us about our favorite authors or genres. The Honda was a huge touring bike with large plastic saddle bags on each side, and that’s where all the books went. We always got a couple for my Mom and when we’d get home, we’d all sit and check out our new treasures.

I don’t know if it was from growing up in a crime-ridden city or from reading hundreds of police mystery books, but shortly after I started college, I knew I wanted to be a cop. I didn’t need a degree to become a cop, but my parents expected me to get a degree and I knew it would be good to have something to fall back on. I graduated on time with a bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice and got hired on a police department four years later. When I finished the police academy, we were told we could choose who we wanted to pin our badges on. There was a never any question who my choice was….

As proud as he was, my Dad hated being the center of attention and was not thrilled that hundreds of people would be watching him pin my badge on me. I remember standing up as straight and proud as I could, and while he as trying to do this hallowed deed, he mumbled, “I’m gonna probably stab you in the fucking heart with this thing….”, and we both laughed.

Five years later as he lay dying of lung cancer, unconscious and on a ventilator, I asked my family to leave the room so that I could be alone with him. I reached into my purse and removed my badge from its holder. I engaged the pin in its latch so as not to stab him, and I placed it in his hand. I wrapped his fingers around it and told him that the day that he pinned it on me was the proudest day of my life. It remains the proudest day of my life.