A Father’s Day tribute to lessons of hilarious retribution
On this Father’s Day 2017, I’ve decided to honor my late father for a couple of valuable lessons that contributed to my general delinquency as an adult and ability to ward off jerks.
I’ve previously written about my father as a WWII hero, but once Japan and Germany surrendered he fought another honorable war for the next 65 years…the glorious struggle against assholes.
In the interest of time and space, I call to your attention two specific lessons passed down to my brother and me that we continue to use a decade after our father’s passing.
The first involves office supply warfare. Having earned the Silver Stars and a Marksmanship medal during the war, my father never lost sight of his targets, nor his dead aim. He was able to combine his shooting skills with his post-war career as an engineer to develop a superior method of shooting rubber bands–a method that vastly increased the speed and accuracy at which a rubber band could reach and sting its intended target. You see, engineers juiced up their afternoon coffee breaks by engaging in brutal rubber band battles, often resulting in shredded pocket protectors and red-stained blueprints.
One day my father walked in on my brother and me as we lamely launched rubber bands at each other, barely raising red marks, let alone the desired welts. He patiently let us in on his secret, as I will now do for you. The trick to faster and more accurate rubber band shooting is to place the rubber band around one of your index fingers. Then, -twist it with your thumb such that one side of the band is loose, and the other is taut. It creates increased tension, resulting in whipass speed and accuracy. Try it. If you do it correctly you can shoot holes in targets, and soft flesh. 
There is little as satisfying as seeing the result of a properly shot rubber band strike an adversary’s ass. It’s really quite exhilarating and gives you a momentary feeling of invulnerability, although you risk getting the crap beat out of you through conventional street warfare methods.
Now, lesson number two, concern my father’s ability to decisively discourage an asshole from a return visit to our home.
My father played in a long-running Friday night poker game with some other engineers and some guys from other professional fields such as journalism, printing and accounting. An erudite bunch for sure. But over time, one of the engineers became very wealthy after going into business for himself and he became rich and obnoxious, partially, by screwing some former friends and associates. That didn’t play well with the poker guys. Oh, they could have simply told the jerk he was out of the game but what fun is that. He’d just argue and call them names and make a scene. My father had a better idea. They would say nothing. When the creep showed up at our apartment for the Friday night game, the boys were fully armed. Not with rubber bands this time, but with full bottles of ice cold, bubbly New York City seltzer…in the kind of bottles with the lever you push to shoot the stuff out with force. 
Knock, knock. Open door. “Hi!,” jerk boy said. BLAM!!! SIX BOTTLES OF SELTZER IN HIS FACE. “Bye!” the poker boys said. Not another word was spoken…or at least I didn’t hear any, over the raucous laughter as the loser ran back to his car, sopping wet, and thoroughly carbonated and humiliated. I attempted to used this valuable lesson shortly thereafter on a loser who kept asking me to go to the movies but my mother didn’t want to clean up the carpet a second time so soon. But I will always have that weapon in my arsenal should it be necessary and I can find New York City-type seltzer bottles in Michigan. 
So on this Father’s Day, among the many gifts for which I thank my dear father, I fondly thank him for the gift of creative non-lethal retribution, and the lesson that whether it’s with rubber bands or seltzer, to always be a straight shooter.
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On this Mother’s Day, 2017 I’m reflecting back on how my late, wonderful mother affected me in my work life.
He sat in front of his locker with a towel on his head and took no questions. It was the man the Detroit Tigers depend upon to successfully seal the deal when they’re ahead in a game. The “closer.” Two nights in a row Francisco Rodriquez, K-Rod, did not seal the deal. He did not close the door. He made enough mistakes to allow the team the Tigers were beating to beat them instead. It made me think about this particular arrangement where we call on someone else to finish the job we started then allow them to suffer loathing, both self and external, when they can’t quite get it done. 
I wasn’t invited to the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, but then again, the President wasn’t there either. So I thought I’d’ make believe I was invited to give the closing monologue. I expect the same uncomfortable silence the actual comedian usually receives.
Indeed, when she died on April 26, 1989, she was cremated and first interred in Forest Lawn Cemetery in California, but in 2002 her kids moved her ashes to the family plot in Jamestown.
As we quietly stood by the plot and thought about how much laughter Lucy had given the world I couldn’t help wonder about this whole business of visiting graves. We use the euphemism of a person’s “final resting place,” but if they were actually “resting” does that mean when the person is refreshed they’d get up and go to dinner or take a walk? Of course not. A half-empty approach would be to quote Newton’s First Law of Motion that states “a body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it.” I have a feeling there is no outside force that will reverse the effects of one’s final “rest.” Push it, pull it, cajole it, sneak up on it. Nothing’s happening.
Every year I travel down there and “visit” them. It makes me feel better even though I know the scientific truth of what lays below my feet. I let them know what’s happened in the family over the past year and I imagine them either smiling, frowning or asking me if I’ve eaten. It’s OK. To not visit would seem like I was abandoning them and that, I just couldn’t do. You don’t think of what’s in the box, because that would be horrible. But you know that’s as close as you’re gonna get to their last known location and somehow that’s comforting.
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