By: Stephen Bishop
Poor dads—all they receive is blame. As much as I’d like to say thank you and take responsibility for my abnormalities (beekeeping being one of them), I’m obligated, as a child, to place blame squarely on my dad. He had even stranger tendencies than I do. To name just one, he searched for junk in the ground. “Beep! Beep! Beep!” and my dad was digging up a fine specimen of pull tab, rusty nail or contorted piece of unidentifiable scrap. He took me to some swell trash heaps to metal detect. Ever since, junk has been in my blood (for which I’ve had many tetanus shots).
In all fairness, my mom should shoulder some blame. For Christmas, she gave my dad the metal detector because he needed a tenth hobby. And she also took away good practical gifts right after my dad gave them to me. She confiscated, in an hour, my first pocketknife. The knife was a little red beauty and so was the wound. I could barely quit crying I was so elated. The thought of a legitimate scar was exciting enough, but showing off stitches would make me the most popular boy in second grade. “What did you get for Christmas?” I imagined my friends asking. I would hold out my hand stoically, three stitches in my forefinger. My friends would clamor in envy.
My dad, however, vetoed the Christmas-morning trip to the emergency room for stitches. He was too busy sanitizing a fishhook in a lighter flame and tying on a small length of ten-pound monofilament. He already had the kitchen table prepped for an inpatient procedure, not wanting to pay emergency room costs. Alas, before he could perform surgery, he stopped the bleeding with superglue, which wasn’t nearly as cool as stitches made of fishing line.
I waver on whether to blame my dad for genetics. It’s not like he chose to pass on the specific genes for my high-viscosity cholesterol. It probably wasn’t smart that he weaned me with bacon, but a boy’s gotta eat. According to my mom, he sprinkled bacon bits on baby food to improve the taste and lower the volume of my shrieking (I think parents may go to jail for that now). Still, it’s easy to blame my dad for my cholesterol, especially when I’m torturing myself by exercising and eating salads. But he’s been torturing himself by eating grilled chicken sandwiches for decades, ever since he had a stent put in when I was in high school. Mutual torture to stave off bad genetics is a great way to bond. There’s nothing like eating a salad together when you’d both rather have baby food sprinkled with bacon.
Though I’m trying to postpone the inevitable for as long as possible, I hope he’s around for my first stent. The thought of having it done without him is frightening. Bonding over a stent is surely better than bonding over a salad. Maybe I’ll have some of the same doctors and nurses he did. Maybe they’ll recognize some similarities in our blockages. We could both blame our forefathers.
If you still have your dad around, blame him for your beekeeping abnormality while you still can. Maybe you can even invite him to don a bee veil and blame him in the beeyard.
But really, it’s best to blame him while taking part in his hobby, whether it’s beekeeping or metal detecting or hunting or fishing. He’ll appreciate it, even if he doesn’t say “I blame you” back. For instance, he may merely grunt and go about his business of tying on a fishhook, which is something else I blame my dad for: He never taught me proper knot-tying. He just made up combinations of loops and twists and gave them a name.
“This is the swallow tail knot,” he would say, after just watching barn swallows skim the pond surface. Later, I realized no one else had heard of a swallow tail knot. That’s probably how all knots were invented though. Some dad somewhere was just trying his best to impress his offspring when he happened upon a combination of loops that actually held.
All I know is, trying his best is one thing you can’t blame a dad for. Nor is tying his best, especially if the knot holds.
