RaisingDad

Even without the Army, my Dad was a pretty tough guy. He lived in a time when you fought for a girl's honor, even if that was more than the girl herself ever did for it.      A funny story he told me was about a fight he got into one night when he was drinking at a bar. He and another guy got into a heated argument, probably about who was the drunkest (" You're drunk!" "No,  you're  drunk!").      Finally, the guy told him, "You want to take it outside?"      "You bet," my Dad said, and led the way.      The heavy bar door opened outward, so my Dad swung it open, stepped outside, and then slammed it against the would-be pugilist who made the mistake of following too close behind him.      Winner! By A Knock-Out! My Father!      At the beginning of another fight, my father assured his opponent that, not only would...

On their way to the Philippines, my Dad's platoon found themselves in Louisiana.      Of course, the U.S. Army can't just have their soldiers sitting around doing nothing, so a Sergeant, who probably wanted to sit around and do nothing, instead found himself having to teach a bored group of them how to use a compass. Now, a compass is a fairly easy tool that all of them already knew how to use, so my father and his buddies weren't happy being treated like idiots.      They were standing by a lake, close to the water, and, this being Louisiana and all, they had an unexpected visitor stalking them from about five to ten feet away.      It was an alligator.      "I don't know how big alligators get," my Dad told me, "but this was a BIG one."      When the Sergeant turned around to see what his men were making a fuss about, he jumped back with a ye...

My Dad isn't one to talk about what he went through when he was stationed in the Philippines during World War Two. In fact, it seems most combat veterans prefer to keep the horrors of what they saw and experienced to themselves.      Every once in a while, however, my father feels the need to get something off his chest.      On once such occasion, he was talking about the Japanese finally surrendering after President Truman authorized the dropping of two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He and the rest of his buddies knew that if there was an invasion of Japan, they would be first in line. He was telling me how happy everybody was when the Japanese finally gave up and the war finally ended.      Naïve as I was and still am, I asked him, "And how did you guys know the war was over?"      "When they stop...

My father went to see his doctor recently.      After the doctor checked him out, he was giving him some advice for a healthy rest of his life, telling him what to eat and what not to eat. My Dad sat there attentively, thinking about baseball scores.      I guess the doctor's eyesight must have finally come into focus, because, after taking a good look at my Dad, he asked me, "How old is your Dad?"      I answered, "He's 97."      You think the doctor would have already known that.      The doctor put away my father's file.      "Oh, let him eat whatever he wants," he told me with a wave of his hand.      He turned to my Dad.      "Eat whatever you want," he told him.      My father nodded, and the doctor turned back to me. ...

Yesterday morning, my wife and I were nice enough to take my father to see an early showing of the new Captain America movie (and I'm not just saying that because they paid me to). As we were sitting there, waiting for the movie to start, my wife offered me a gummy bear. I took it because they're my favorite candy, don't ask me why.      As I was chewing on it, enjoying every gummy morsel, I made the mistake of inhaling. When I inhaled, the chewed-up candy got sucked in with the oxygen and lodged in my windpipe... sort of. It would have lodged completely if I had followed my first instinct to gasp in a huge lung full of air, but I didn't. Instead, to dislodge the almost-stuck candy, I tried to expel what little air I had in my lungs. It wasn't a whole lot, but it was enough. It pushed the little booger out of the way enough for me to take a careful breath and then cough the rest of the candy out. I d...

There's two things my Dad does more now than he did when he was younger. One of them is go to the doctor, and when he goes to the doctor, I go with him, because he only hears about every other word, and those missing words get him into trouble. The last time he saw the doctor by himself, my wife and I were waiting for him in the room where old magazines go to die. He came back white as a ghost, visibly shaken.      "What's wrong, Dad?" my wife asked him, both of us concerned.      "The doctor said I only have a year to live," he told us, his eyes bugging out like Roger Rabbit's.      "Oh, my God," my wife said.      Me, I asked to see the doctor. Fortunately, the doctor is a pretty nice guy, so he charged me a discounted rate to consult with him.      "Doc," I said, "my father said you told him he only has a year to live."      "What?" the d...