Published Wednesday, October 13, 2010 1:53 PM
Updated Wednesday, October 13, 2010 1:54 PM
Yet here I am shopping online – in my spare moments, not on company time, of course – for an electric guitar. Once a musician always a musician, I suppose.
Other aspects of character tend to get a little more colorful with age. My propensity for bad jokes, awful puns, double entendres, and wise elbow one liners has, like character lines around the eyes, only deepened with age. I suppose I always knew, even when I was a little boy, I liked to be witty – which at that age is simply a euphemism for “deeply annoying.”
However you tend to see it, it’s too late; I’ll never change.
Why? Because it amuses me, that’s why.
Of course, this is not without it’s dangers. I can remember entering into my first true smart guy phase. I was about 10 or 11, maybe in the fourth grade, and was already developing an extremely wise line of chatter amusing only to me, much as a comb over only looks good to the guy with the comb.
At any rate, report card day came -- something known to kids then as NBC (National Butt Cuttin’) Day -- and I had no math grade. This was a good thing, I thought, because I knew I was not doing that great in that class and would no doubt be in some trouble over the C that would undoubtedly eventually appear there.
At any rate, my dad glanced at it briefly, then in his quietest, most ominous voice, said, “Why don’t you have a math grade?”
A simple “I don’t know” would have sufficed. Instead, I cut my eyes, shrugged slightly, and said, “I dunno. Why?”
When I came to a minute or so later, I could see the seal of the United States Military Academy, and the year he graduated, from his class ring, imprinted clearly over my right eye when I looked into the rear view mirror. Dear old Pappy spent most of his career ordering grown men around, and wasn’t about to brook any semblance of insubordination from a shorter version of himself.
There was the classic time dad took us all to Disney World, a trip that for him was deliberately choosing to vacation in hell for a week. He hated crowds; he hated cartoons; he hated traffic; he hated tourists; and he hated Walt Disney. But he loved his family so he took that one for the team.
Nonetheless, he spent the entire trip sitting in the back seat, grumbling to himself, legal pad and pencil in hand, constantly figuring out how much the trip was costing him per day. How much per gallon of gas, how much per kid at Disney, how much per sop of syrup on a silver dollar pancake. He did this the entire trip, apparently taking some perverse pleasure in this sheer fiduciary torture, sort of like the masochist who insists on having a root canal without anesthesia.
The trip down was bad enough, but the trip back was worse. It was biker week at Daytona, and I-95 was inundated with motorcycles. Bikers as far as the eye could see. Bikers zooming between carloads of tourons like us. Bikers everywhere.
About halfway through Florida, I decided it would be both intellectually stimulating and interesting to my captive audience to count the number of motorcycles I saw on the road. As I was sitting in the backseat between my father and my older sister, I figured I was in the perfect position to inform everyone exactly how many we had passed, at every moment, with about the same precision and frequency as the Atomic Clock at Annapolis, only much, much louder.
I think I was at number 952 and rapidly closing on the first thousand when dad’s fingers whitened, tightened, and snapped his pencil point, smearing the latest tall column of figures he had been adding. He whipped off his sunglasses and fixed me with the most disgusted look I’ve ever seen in my life.
I don’t know what was more deafening -- that one moment of pregnant silence, or the two-syllable volcanic explosion that followed: “SHUT UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Well, thankfully I lived through and outgrew all that.
Now I just write columns.