"Why don't we go to church, Daddy?"

"Because church is nothing but lying old men."

True enough, but still pretty harsh stuff to spring on a six-year old.

"How was work, Daddy?"

"Work sucks. Marry money."

Hee. I must have heard this line a million times. Strangely, though, it doesn't seem to have sunk in...

"Watch out for old men driving big cars and wearing funny hats"

This was Dad's driving advice. It's scary how true it is. Nine times out of ten, the bonehead you see doing something unbelievably stupid behind the wheel will turn out to be an old guy in a funny hat. Check it out.

"I'm going out. I'll be back in an hour, unless I get a better offer."

I always imagined my dad's nightly walks as him encountering a continuous string of people with better offers than life with us, and I was always really relieved when he came back.

"The old guy who lives in the basement"

We had a kind of scary basement, very dusty and not a lot of light. My little sister was terrified of it. So, Dad told her one day that she should be scared, because there was a crazy old guy who lived down there, who liked to eat blonde little girls. I'm still not entirely sure if this was supposed to be reverse psychology, or if it was just Dad being evil. Lynne was scared of the basement for much of her childhood.

"Wheee! Stay away from drugs, kids!"

Every time Dad realized he had been caught doing something completely moronic, he would start to giggle, and tell Lynne and I to never ever experiment with drugs. Maybe it would have worked, if he didn't always seem so amused by his own screwups.

"Jesus Christ! Kids and dogs!"

This was a reference to a longer quote, basically that kids and dogs are both noisy and smelly creatures that no sane person would willingly associate with. Loosely translated, it meant, "Knock it off, whatever you're doing now is really starting to annoy me."

Heh. So, that's my dad. Happy Father's Day.

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