You can read the rest of the responses here; they are very nearly all perfect and there are quite honestly hundreds of them. DADS.
All dads are different, of course; life is a rich tapestry of dads.
Tags: dads
You can read the rest of the responses here; they are very nearly all perfect and there are quite honestly hundreds of them. DADS.
All dads are different, of course; life is a rich tapestry of dads.
Tags: dads
I do not have twitters, but my dad definitely broke out the graph paper and mechanical pencils to create a to-scale drawing of our dining room and kitchen so he could map out seating for Christmas Eve when one year we had like 30 people coming.
Ah! I totally forgot my dad did the same thing! Only it was Thanksgiving and 50 people and he used the to-scale drawings to build a new table and also table-extender things? in the exact size to fit in the empty space to get everyone a flat surface to eat on. Except then there weren’t enough chairs, so he had to call up everyone he knew with card table sets to borrow folding chairs. (why didn’t we borrow their card tables in the first place? we only had 2 of our own)
The best part is that after that Thanksgiving, he dismantled the tables – which were plywood with 2×4 and 4×4 supports – and used the lumber to make built-in bookshelves for my sister’s and my closets, but there was still lumber left, so he opened a wall under the stairs to build a cabinet for dry goods.
That’s some higher-level Dad’ing, right there.
My dad had a SPECIAL NOTEBOOK with TABLE DIAGRAMS ON EVERY PAGE for seating charts.
My dad would TOTALLY do that. Your dad isn’t an engineer, by chance…? Engineers like my dad are the only people I know who have graph paper just lying around.
That actually sounds like something I would do. OMG MAYBE I’VE SECRETLY BEEN A DAD ALL ALONG.
I did this for a dinner party once in grad school! (It was a pie-themed dinner party, and no dinner has every been better.)
Oh man. Dads, am I right?
My Dad, every summer, sends my sister and I videos of the sunset in my parent’s backyard, complete with soundtrack, provided by his voice. It sounds very much like he’s trying to imitate an orchestra of some kind, replete with cymbal crashes and a choir (I think). He normally starts it off with “Da da daaaaaaa!” and then it dissolves into giggles, but then he collects himself and it frequently ends with the Star Wars theme.
This is one of my favorite parts of summer and I save each and every one of those videos. I also unabashedly show them to everyone I know.
That is incredible. What a Dad!
My dad would regularly place call-ahead food orders at fine establishments such as McDonalds. I’m sure it saved him dozens of seconds over the course of his life.
The meal my dad was having just before his first seizure was nachos. He was at a folk festival at the time.
He got air-lifted by a helicopter and later in the hospital he was upset because he hadn’t got to finish them.
‘I had extra refried beans’ he said.
So many Dad-Moments to choose from. When I had a rash and asked my dad what it was, he said it was “creeping meatball-ism.”
Bought me AAA for Christmas when I moved to North Dakota so I wouldn’t get stranded in -40 weather. Did this for several years, actually. If there is a more dad-like Christmas gift, I don’t know what it is.
OMG, I would LOVE if my dad did this for me. (We live in northern Michigan, so.)
That’s really touching, actually!
Last Christmas my dad got me a pair of heavy-duty scissors and a tire pressure gauge. Dads.
are you me? I went to college in ND and this was my dad’s go-to birthday gift. and i loved it.
That’s what my dad always got me for Christmas, too! That and bath towels in hideous colors.
I still get Dad-gifted AAA membership. It truly is the Dad-est of Dad gifts.
My grandmother does this for me, actually! Every year since I got my license (five years ago now) she’s given me an AAA membership.
My dad got me a subscription to the New Yorker for Christmas one year, which is a very dad gift for a different flavor of dad.
My dad once got me a subscription to Mother Jones – yet another dad flavor on the rich tapestry of mixed metaphors.
My Dad still gives me the AAA membership, even though I could get something similar through my car insurance.
He also reminded me that I could get discounts for other things (hotels, shows, etc…) using my AAA card.
My dad emailed me and my sister today to remind us to buy new Young Person railcards before our 25th birthday next month. He also sent a link to lots of discount codes.
Every year for Christmas my parents give me and each other some kind of personal safety thing—last year I got an updated runner ID bracelet with my new address and some bike visibility stuff, and they got each other this gadget that can cut your seatbelt and smash your windshield if you are trapped in your car in an accident. (This probably explains a lot about how I turned out.)
My dad got me a fire extinguisher for my birthday once. When I looked slightly bemused he was all ‘lol, jk here is your real present’. It was an IKEA table lamp.
My dad just emailed my sisters and me yesterday to tell us that he wouldn’t be renewing our AAA memberships after almost 15+ years. Even though it was a sensible move by a new retiree and we all have jobs and families of our own, it still made us sad.
One year I also got an emergency kit for the car!
My father-in-law still buys us AAA every year. It’s a really sweet, dad-like gift.
I believe I’ve mentioned this before but my dad once gave me a shoe shine kit, complete with one of his old black cotton socks, cut in half (best shoe shine cloth you’ll ever use).
I loved reading this last night on the Twitter! I don’t have anything to add about my Dad, he is ugh just something but he is my Dad and the only one I have? So there is that. My husband is proving to be a really amazing dad to the kids we made and for that I am grateful. I imagine he is giving our offspring lots of material to participate in a cool thread like this someday. He loves Antique Roadshow. One night the kids and I were laughing and dancing and he was trying to watch his program. He blew up at us and said “Seriously guys, so laugh on your own time.” DADS. He is otherwise a lovely and fund human being, just don’t interrupt his program.
When I was a kid I convinced my dad to take my tamagotchi with him to work for the day because they’d finally banned them at school. In the middle of a meeting it went off, much to my dad’s dismay, and he had to fish it out of his bag, whereupon the two guys he was having the meeting with whipped out their own kids’ tamagotchis and all three of them sat there frantically pushing buttons trying to get them to turn off.
this is beautiful.
DADS
I love this so much.
This is the best thing.
Crying in my office at other people’s Dads.
My dad is a bit crap, but he does go on wonderfully predictable rants about how class inequality is destroying the country. He used to email ONLY IN CAPS, but managed to figure out the shift key in 2007.
My dad texts in all caps, somehow. And it took him a very long time to find the space button, so I’DGETTEXTSTHATLOOKEDLIKETHISANDTHEYWEREREALLYHARDTOFIGUREOUT
My dad leaves out mst of the vwls whn he txts, lk ths, whch mks it seem lk he is txtng thru clnched tth. At least that’s how I read them aloud to my friends.
My dad signs all his texts. (Recently: “How was your cake received? By the way am baking cookies. Stop by if you want some. Love, Dad.”)
Yeah, my dad who has a fancy well-paying job in the city still types with two index fingers. Watching him write an e-mail is a nightmare.
The Tyrannosaurus Rex type. I know it well.
My friend’s dad prints out all his emails to read.
My dad, though he sort of drives me crazy when we’re not living a few thousand miles apart, went through a lengthy phase some years ago where he got an app that automatically translated all texts he sent into German. He refused to disable it and, when called for clarification, stretched his conversational German to the breaking point before finally bursting out laughing and going back to English.
Your dad sounds a lot like my dad. Although I did manage to divert an email debate about what online news sources he should and should not be reading by sending him a link to pictures of owls, to which he responded “LOVE THE OWL PIX!!!”.
My dad is not a native English speaker which means that occasionally his texts read a bit oddly. My favourite was after I asked him to do something small like feed the hamster or close a window I left open and he responded with:
” It has been done.”
I felt like I might have inadvertently ordered an assassination.
One year for Christmas, my stepdad got everyone in the family a “car emergency tool” that was a combo flashlight (both regular white light and a flashing red light), seatbelt-cutter, and window-smasher. You know, for when we are inevitably trapped in our cars underwater.
No lie, I am desperately jealous – I always wanted one of those. Less for trapped in car underwater, which D: and more for – idk, Ragnarok?
My dad, too, is fond of bequeathing us all with car-emergency-related accoutrement. I grew up in California, but damned if I didn’t have an ice scraper that was powered by my car’s cigarette lighter, thanks to dad.
Wait…how did it need power? It’s an ice scraper. Did it have a heating function, or did it vibrate or something?
It had a heating function – only the top in Dad technology! I don’t think I ever used it.
But you could just turn on the heat in your car! You’re already using the cigarette lighter, so I don’t see why you wouldn’t just run the heat.
(this is my own Dad-ness, that I critique other Dad-nesses as being impractical and overly fancy.)
One year in our Christmas stockings my mom and I got those. But I don’t think they had flashlights–just a seatbelt-cutter and window-smasher. I made fun of this for YEARS until my husband was in a wreck with a semi and had to cut himself out of his seatbelt with the knife he kept in his boot and was like “I wish I had a tool like that!” so I had to bitterly concede it may one day be useful.
Is your husband Crocodile Dundee?
I’m going to start calling him that now.
My mother asked for one of those last Christmas. What do you even call them? I was in Home Depot making vague hand gestures, going “She saw it on tv? And it’s for — like to get out of your car — there’s something to cut your seatbelt with, but it’s not like a Swiss Army knife, it’s — specialized to cars? She saw it on tv!”
They ordered something and shipped it to her and she claimed to love it and to this day I’ve never seen it with my own eyes or *ever learned what the hell it’s called.*
If you look on Amazon, “car emergency tool” gets you a couple hits of items pretty similar to the ones my stepdad got us. Sadly, I don’t have mine anymore; I THINK I neglected to take it out of my old car before it was donated to charity. Don’t tell my stepdad, though.
I…bought myself one of those. oh my god, I’M MY OWN DAD!!!*
*this is actually true. longish story time (including the mildest possible spoiler for Breaking Bad): a while back my parents were driving through NM & checking out all the real-life places where BrBa was filmed. my mom texted me that they drove past the White family home, but didn’t get a photo, because they had a really bright security light on a motion sensor. I texted back, “to deter would-be pizza flingers, no doubt,” & then there was a long pause, followed by her response: “your dad said the exact same thing.”
DAD JOKES: TELL ‘EM YOURSELF, LADIES! #FEMINISM
Reading everyone’s stories about Dads giving them tape measures and pocket levels and keychain flashlights, I remembered the Christmas that I gave my Dad a box containing a half-dozen pocket-sized tools (including, of course, a tape measure and a pocket-sized bubble level) so he could keep them in his glovebox, and I thought “…I Dadded Dad!”
That is a fantastic present idea and I am stealing it immediately.
God, this is me, so much. I came to the realisation a few years ago that I act like a Dad – I am obsessed with Costco, spend a lot of time perfecting my barbecue technique, tell punny jokes, etc. I guess it’s for the best because my Dad is on the other side of the world, I have learned to Dad myself in his absence, haha.
Yes! My dad has given that exact gift to me, my brother AND my husband. I think he buys them in bulk at Costco.
But wait, now I am panicking (due to the OBVIOUS inevitability of me ending up in a car underwater one day): why do you need to cut your seatbelt off?? Can you not just push the button? My car has been knifeless this whole time!
When I moved to Los Angeles, my dad gave me a hatchet to keep under my carseat for this exact purpose. Slash to protect myself from crazy Angelenos. I usually forget about it, but whenever I vacuum my car, I find it again and have a moment where I think fondly of my dad.
Not gonna lie, Twitter Dad stories was probably my favorite part of the week. DADS
There were just so many good ones!
Even now that I’m 30 and my siblings are also adults, my dad will still slide us each a 1-dollar bill if we order water in a restaurant instead of soda. It’s like a reverse soda tax.
This is wonderful. I will do this.Even if we are a cashless society by then.
Love it! I ask my dad permission if I can order a beer when we go out to dinner, or tell him I’ll pay for it myself. NO drinks at restaurants!
My dad always slips me a $20 when they drop me off at the airport after I visit, in case I need food or a cab or something. He and mom also stay until I’ve cleared security.
SO MUCH DAD STUFF.
– every single time he answers the phone, he says: “pentagon, logistics!” (when i was a child this resulted in a lot of hang-up calls from my very confused friends)
– every time he leaves or enters a room, he pretends to smack his head against the door, and/or pretends to trip.
– if someone tells him he’s funny, he responds with: “well, looks aren’t everything!”
– once, when he visited me at college and met some of my friends for the first time, he told three jokes about anal sex in a row, and then when i walked him back to his car and he said: “sorry about all the buttstuff jokes back there, i don’t know what came over me.”
Joker dads! My favourite kind of dad!
My dad has been answering the phone with fake business names for years! I think he mostly tries to get me and my brother but it’s resulted in a few confused strangers.
my dad’s phone joke is:
*phone rings*
Dad: “better get that, it might be the phone.” STILL TO THIS DAY.
the disparity in my friends’ reactions vs. my own when I was growing up suggests that this joke becomes less funny with each successive hearing.
(he also likes to call the phone “the Ameche” because some guy named Don Ameche stared in an Alexander Graham Bell biopic in the 1930s. in related news, apparently my dad’s been posting to Urban Dictionary.)
That is an actual great joke.
oh, I’ll definitely be telling him you said that. he’ll be so pleased.
(seriously, though, picture hearing it 2-3x/day for 15 years or so.)
A while ago my dad went through a phase where he would mock your clothing using that “the 90s called” joke. Except he could never remember how the joke went, so he’d be like, “Yeah, uh, the 90s are on the phone, they want their jacket back”. Oh dads.
my dad had a “….NOT!” phase, about ten years after that was a thing. and it was the best.
Your dad and my dad would get along great. My dad calls his wallet his “André” because there was a politician of some renown in the 60s called André Ouellette.
that’s amazing!! oh, dads.
Hahaha, Dad names for things. My Dad always calls Wikipedia the Funk & Wagnel. XD
MY DAD DOES THIS TOO! And now so do I, because I’m turning into my dad.
if someone tells him he’s funny, he responds with: “well, looks aren’t everything!”
My Dad makes the exact same joke.
PENTAGON LOGISTICS. That is amazing.
My dad’s phone joke is to always answer “Yellow!” instead of the usual “hello”. I used to roll my eyes, now I often respond “Orange!”
YES to fake phone greetings. When my dad’s feeling especially Dad, he answers with “County Morgue! You stab ’em, we slab ’em, how can I help you?”
Okay that line is seriously fucking wonderful. Points to your dad.
My dad did that one too! Except it was “Charlie’s Casket Corporation, You Stab ‘Em, We Slab ‘Em!”
We need a separate thread for phone greetings, but a bar I worked at routinely had the phone answered (in a very bored voice) “Suicide Hotline… Shoot….”
MY DAD DOES THIS TOO. or “You kill em, we chill em!”
My favorite is when my brother tries “Hello, Pizza Hut?” or “Smithville Methodist Church, how can I direct your call?”
Hahaha my dad is CONSTANTLY making weird sex jokes. He is only 53 and already a full-fledged dirty old man, Luckily my friends (and boyfriends, UGH DAD) have found it hilarious.
My grandpa has been answering the phone as “Mission Control” for the last 30 years and confusing telemarketers and family friends ever since
Oh god I just had a flashback to my cousin’s wedding, wherein his bride’s parents had a John and Yoko style naked photo of themselves on the photo table (Florida panhandle hippies I guess) and for some reason my dad BROUGHT THIS PHOTO TO MY GRANDMA, HIS MOTHER IN LAW, to ensure she would see it. She is a very conservative Catholic lady and was like 96 at the time. She couldn’t handle it.
“WHY DID YOU DO THAT WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU” I hissed at him through clenched teeth, after. “I don’t know,” he replied, sheepishly. “I just couldn’t help myself.”
My dad does the phone thing too! Although he likes to do variations on “City Morgue!” jokes (“you kill em, we chill em!” or “you stab em, we slab em!” are his go-tos).
BUTTSTUFF.
My dad is a Midwestern strong, silent type but he called me every day while I was interning in a visitor center at a national park in Alaska to ask what kind of wildlife I saw that day.
this makes me well up a bit
Me too, to be honest.
That is so cute.
Now I’m picturing your dad as Ron Swanson.
Not inaccurate; he is kind of like a gentler version of Ron Swanson.
ugh this is making me verklempt.
LOVE. Longest phone conversation I’ve had with my dad was him listing all of the kinds of wood he has probably used from Oregon, while I was in the woods in Oregon.
Also, he ends every phone conversation with “I think I’m done now.”
When avian flu was a big story he got us all Tamiflu from….somewhere and made us carry it around on our person at all times, in case of sudden avian flu incidents in New England.
MY DAD TOO!!!! He works for a company that makes supplies for flu outbreaks, so he gets briefed on them all the time. Everytime there’s a pandemic threat he sends me something – by now I have a box of masks, Tamiflu, a wind up flashlight and a battery operated radio.
Ha! I’m glad I’m not alone. Though at least your dad works in a flu-related field. I really have no idea where my dad got the Tamiflu. Doctor-friend, maybe?
I am in my 30s, too, and happily settled/working, etc, and my dad will still try to give me twenty bucks before he and my mom leave after visiting. I take it, and sneak it back into his luggage. We do this every time they visit, and never mention it to each other.
Before I read the rest of these, my dad:
-When I was 15 and dating a boy named Duncan, my dad would call me to the phone by yelling “It’s Hunky Dunkie on the phone!” without covering the receiver.
-Made up a knock knock joke to mock my childhood lack of coordination
-Nicknamed me Toadface
-When I was one of 3 winners in a statewide competition in college, patted me on the shoulder & said “pretty good” or something to that effect
OH and I’ve told this here before BUT he bought a canoe at a garage sale despite not knowing how to canoe, or how to repair the giant hole in the cvanoe, OR living anywhere near a body of water suitable for canoeing. “It was $50!”
OH and the time he was so proud and ready to show up his brother-in-law who also garage sales because he bought one of these:
He brought it over to bro-in-law’s house to show off, bro-in-law immediately rushes out of the room & comes back with a bigger one he got for cheaper. Dad was so cut.
Dads and canoes with holes in them: let’s write a book. (Seriously there is no canoe my dad thinks can’t be fixed and consequently used in water, by humans.)
My dad got a surfboard at a pawn shop, I think, for all the surfing we were going to do on vacation? He had it in the garage for YEARS.
Excellent nickname! Mine was Squidfart. Sister and I were collectively Squidlings.
To this day, my mother still calls me “Mr Toadface.” I am 41.
But always 17 in our hearts.
How’s the new job?
It is the best thing, I am getting paid to write puns (among many, many other things), I am working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life and I miss you guys bunches. You are a lovely person for asking, Mr. Toadface.
My dad nicknamed my sisters Toad Foot and Buzzard Feather. We still, to this day, call them the Toad and the Buzzard. (They were not unusually ugly children and grew up into normal, attractive women.)
HUNKY DUNKIE <3
Seventh grade boyfriend was Durwood (Darrin), eighth grade was Julius Pierpont (JP), ninth grad was just scowls because it was like he knew I tongue-kissed the dingus.
I am really going to out myself here, but my dad has always been fond of old country western stuff. Wayyyy back when, we recorded the Disney cartoon of Pecos Bill (featuring Roy Rogers! And The Sons of the Pioneers!), which is sort of epic in its cowboy-ish-ness. When I went to college, to remind me of home, he left me a voicemail on my cell phone of the entire show. I still wish I had that.
ETA – this is in reply to paisleyLo’s story of her dad’s video “soundtracks”. Dads are pretty awesome sometimes.
Is that the one where Pecos Bill’s fiance’s bustle bounces her to the moon? I loved that thing.
That’s the one! I love it, too.
My dad, as a way of saying how much he loves my mom, will (in the summer, usually) ask out loud, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
So a few years ago, on a nice day, he came home from work. I was reading in the kitchen and my mom was making dinner. My dad walked in, said hi, and took a few moments doing a kind of double-take — looking at my mom, looking outside, looking at my mom, looking back outside. There was LITERAL COMPARISON happening before my eyes!
Also he made graphs at the dinner table to try to explain things when we were growing up.
that is adorable & also, so, SO dadly.
Lovely.
On long road trips, my dad will drive an additional 85 miles using back roads in order to avoid paying $3 in tolls.
The first (or second?) Dad Magazine with the headline about routes and making good time is super relevant to my Dad. Every time I see him he asks me which route I took to get there. (The interstate, always the interstate Dad, yes I know I could take 35 to 71 to 29)
my dad moved away from Chicago in…I’m gonna say…approximately 1965…& after I moved there for college (in 2001) any time I casually mentioned taking public transportation, he’d grill me on the exact series of buses/trains/etc. I took from point A to point B. (this continued until I moved in 2013.)
My dad would do this too. He would also drive 15 miles away to save 5 cents a gallon on gas, and would just look at me funny when I questioned the wisdom of this strategy. 5 cents cheaper, dangit!
Yes. My dad obsessively tracks gas prices via some app on his phone and will always submit the current price at any station he passes. Once I asked him why he did this, and he said he got entered into a raffle every time he submitted one. Has he ever won? Nope.
You must be one of my uncles, or possibly my mother, because my grandpa does exactly this (and the “drive around for half an hour to save 2 cents on gas” thing)
my grandpa also refers to the GPS/our Google maps app as “that damn machine.” He insists he knows what the best route is better than “that damn machine.” As a result of listening to him rather than the damn machine, we got lost three times on a recent trip. This story is endearing when I tell it but was absolutely infuriating at the time.
My stepdad is flying on Friday for the first time since the 90s. He borrowed my roller bag and asked if he could put sandwiches in it. Then he made me show him how to turn off his cell phone. To close, we practiced going through security scanners. Then he gave me a pumpkin and sent me on my way.
Giggling at length about your last sentence.
Right? It’s a nice pumpkin, but – I don’t, I just, okay thank you?? Dad-gifts!
My dad stayed with me for a week this summer and during that time he weeded the yard, tacked down the edge of a rug, and sanded down several doorframes because the doors weren’t closing due to humidity.
Aw, someone on the twitter said “Dad Tax.” I might have thought my dad actually made that up….
Oh, I’m so happy these are all together somewhere. I nearly responded: “Drinks probably 3 glasses of alcohol a week, max. Has 200+ bottles of homemade wine stored in the basement ‘just in case.'”
But my Twitter name is my real name, and if my dad ever found out I’d let the Internet at large trace his precious wine stash, he’d have a fit.
He will be a valuable asset during Doomsday.
When my grandpa passed, there were 96 cases of homemade wine in the basement. But you could visit at 9am and he’d say “want a glass of wine, bud?” and then not drink any. He passed a few months before I got married and we served it at my wedding.
my grandpa had a massive wine collection that he always said we would drink “over his dead body.” So we did. At his wake.
My dad fixes everything with coathangers and duct tape, including this parrot harness with flowerpot epaulettes (a prop for a Travelling Parrot Salesman in the French Resistance, in an am-dram production of ‘Allo ‘Allo). https://twitter.com/rosieclarke/status/4781470273…
My dad brought his entire toolbelt down to NYC to help me install a single shelf in my new apartment.
The thing that makes me happiest is the sheer number of dads who foist $20 bills on their children when they leave from a visit (mine does it too). Is there some kind of dad memo that gets passed around telling them to do this? Is it written entirely in bad puns?
YES. When I used to come home from college, my dad would leave a $20 hidden in my stuff, usually a shoe. Most recently, I came home to go to a baseball game (for which my parents had already graciously bought tickets) and my dad gives me, my boyfriend, and my two brothers each a $20 for food.
Yess my dad likes to hand me a $20 “for cab fare”. Even (especially?) when we are standing directly outside of the subway station for my train.
My family talks to each other in basically a distinct dialect of verbal tics, nicknames, and inside jokes we’ve built up over many years, so there are many stories, but my dad has this recurring bit where if you call home and you’re talking to him and my mom wants to say something, he’ll pretend like she’s forcibly taking the phone away from him. (“Noooooo she’s taking it away from me don’t take it away from me nooooooo AHHHHHH…..” trailing off into silence.)
I always laugh, but my mother does not think it is funny.
a distinct dialect of verbal tics, nicknames, and inside jokes we’ve built up over many years
That is the most succinct description of my family’s communication I’ve ever read.
You’re both so lucky!
My sister didn’t want my dad embarassing her at parents weekend when she was in college. My dad showed up with a puffy paint t-shirt that said [SISTER]’S DAD on it with little stars.
My dad still refers to several of my friends by Roles They Played In Shows We Did Together In High School…. which was 12 years ago.
DAD: Who is coming to this thing?
ME: Joey. Joey, dad. You’ve known him for years. You talked to him about playing the bass.
DAD: ……..
ME: …………………
DAD: Oh, the Major General!!!
ETA: he will actually call them these in human conversation. As in, a friend walks into my parents’ house 12 years after playing Harold Hill, and he still says “Well, look who it is – the music man!”
OMG my mother does this ALL. THE. TIME.
I’m still “the tooth” to my elementary school friend’s dad. That was nearly twenty years ago.
My dad does this too, but only to one of my friends who was I think Aristotle in some dreadful student-written play 7 years ago. But he can’t remember which old-timey Greek dude he was and will just guess random names. “Aristophanes? Heracles? Pythagoras? You know, the guy in the sheet.”
My friend’s dad calls me “the massage lady’s daughter” despite having known me for 27 years.
One of my friends in high school really wanted to go to Dartmouth. She didn’t get in. Now all of my friends from high school are “Yeah, I know, the one who went to Dartmouth.”
My dad told us that the speedbumps in parking lots were animate aliens called Dilepticons. Very big ones were Trilepticons. Still warns us (and we warn each other) of large speed bumps with “Watch out, big Dilepticons in this lot!”
I also have a hilarious story of a pre-Actual Being a Dad story involving the purchase of a white Speedo.
Oh man, I am going to think of this every time I see speedbumps, this is great.
Oh, man, he also haaaates finding bobby pins around the house. Once he taped one to a post-it and stuck it on my door with the caption
“AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHHHHHHHH!
(found in my office).”
He likes sticking things to doors, actually – funny Dilberts and biohazard stickers, mostly (he works in biological weapons detection).
haha, this made me remember that my Dad once tore out an ad about shoes from a magazine and stuck it to my door…because I have lots of shoes, get it?! oh, Dads…
My dad used to do things like that when he was teaching me to drive. If I ran a stop sign, it was always “Oh god, you just hit a busload of nuns!!” or “Those poor kindergardeners! There’s blood everywhere! One just went through the windshield!”
This may be the only reason I don’t run stop signs.
Growing up, my sisters and I had a Disney tape that included the song “I’m My Own Grandpa”. We listened to it so much, my dad made us sit down one night and diagram the family tree from that song. He didn’t believe that the singer could REALLY be his own grandpa. We never listened to that song again.
My dad and I sometimes run road races together. When race course volunteers direct us which way to go, he likes to run the opposite way and shout “I’m delusional!” while waving his arms, as if he’s been running for so long that he has no concept of space or direction.
He also loves to run past race spectators holding coffee and say “oh thank you so much, I need this” and try to grab their drinks.
hahaha I haven’t thought about that song in years.
I love the diagramming thing! My dad hated the song “All For You” by Sister Hazel because he thought the chorus lyrics were mumbo-jumbo, so every time it came on the radio, he would LOUDLY sing nonsense lyrics over top of it. My dad and I have been estranged for many years now but that song still cracks me up.
I think it’s a tie between the time that he cut up a whole bunch of tomatoes to teach me geography and the time that he came spluttering in with a condom he found in my car (I was 18, and had been stuck at home looking for a job/apartment for a couple of months).
“I think we need to talk.”
“Dad, my boyfriend’s been staying in my room for a week. I lost my virginity 2 years ago. I get tested for STDs annually. We do NOT need to have that talk. Oh, and isn’t it so much better that I’ve been having safe sex than the alternative?”
Dad: *blush*, *mutter something unintelligible*, *exit stage left*.
I think it’s important to point out that we never had a sex talk (birds and the bees, NOTHING) before this, so I am pretty sure that in his Dad mind he figured that I wouldn’t have sex ever because we never talked about it.
My Mum once tried to talk to me about contraception. I interrupted with,
“Mum, I’m now 20. Also, I am on the pill.”
“…Oh! Right. Right right. Okay.”
Poor Mum. A shock.
In 1988, my zydeco/blues-listening dad took two of my friends and me to a New Kids On The Block concert.
(I had a lot more to say about this, but then realized, eh, that kind of sums it up.)
My dad took me to my first concert, the Spice Girls, on the condition that he could pick the next one. We saw the Pixies a few months later. Things worked out ok.
It really does sum it up.
My dad attended multiple Good Charlotte and Something Corporate concerts in my sister’s youth. He said he stood in the back, part of a long wall of (presumably confused but resigned) dads.
In the early 90s my stepdad and his friend took me and several friends to a Debbie Gibson concert for my birthday. (If I recall, mom had the honor of taking me to New Kids.)
My dad has incredibly organized file cabinets containing every manual and warranty card for every product he has ever purchased for the last 30 years. The other file cabinets contain journal articles he has found throughout his career as a doctor. The only care package I received that was solely from my father during college contained a bottle of vitamin D supplements and the printout of an article from JAMA about the importance of vitamin D.
Also, when he goes to get gas, he says, “While E has always stood for excellent in my book, I think it means…WE’RE OUT OF GAS!”
He spent several hundred dollars buying fencing to protect the garden from deer and we still only ended up with like 5 tomatoes, so when we ate them both my parents kept laughing that the tomatoes were $100 each. This was hilarious to them, and now every year they judge the success of the garden by the cost per tomato.
In college, I asked for a (small!) basic toolbox for Christmas. I was thinking, like, a couple screwdrivers, a hammer, maybe a wrench. Instead I got a huge yellow toolbox that was bigger than my art supplies box. And I was an art major.
I graduated more than a decade ago and I still haven’t used half the stuff in that box.
My dad has looked 42 years old since he was 17. He is now 62. It’s unnerving, actually.
I posted this in another thread, but I got the most Dad email ever a few weeks ago. In its entirety:
Subject: Ken Burns Roosevelt PBS series fascinating to me.
Body: dad
I LOVE THIS.
That is a thing of beauty and should be framed.
This one kills me. Perfection.
*standing ovation*
This is Peak Dad.
My mom once sent me an email and the entire message was in the subject line. She also signed it off with “cyber mom”.
Oh, all my dad’s emails have the entire message in the subject line. (Only on rare occasions does he include something – like “dad” – in the body.)
It is possibly the only habit he shares with my mom, who does the same thing, despite the fact that they’ve been divorced for 27 years and rarely correspond. I’m still confused about why it’s A Thing that parents (or just my parents?) do.
I got this on my birthday this year:
Subject: Happy birthday
Body: love dad
I was impressed that it was actually on my birthday, the previous few years had generally been happy birthday texts a couple days late. As a child, my dad once asked me how old my sister and i were (or when our birthdays were? one of those). It makes me feel less bad when his birthday get close and I inevitably call my sister to ask which day it is.
*golf clap* this is a thing of tremendous dad-beauty and I would cross-stitch it on a sampler, if it weren’t a little creepy to cross-stitch someone else’s dad’s email on a sampler.
YES
Once when I was little my friend and I asked my dad what a light year was. He sat us down at the kitchen table and started doing all kinds of mathematical calculations on a piece of paper and trying to explain. My friend and I got bored and went outside to play, then we looked in the front window and saw my dad still working on the piece of paper and talking to himself.
Awwwww Bless 🙂 (I might have said that out loud just now 😉
When I asked Dad how high geostationary orbit was, we sat down with paper and mechanical pencils and figured it out. I must’ve been all of 10. (About 36,000km above the equator.)
Within probably ten minutes of coming to visit me at my newly purchased first house, my dad was on the roof cleaning out the gutters. Also, my sister and I still roll on the floor with laughter when we remember the goofy grin on his face we caught one day while he was watching a “Bonanza” retrospective (my dad, in general, is not the “grinning” type).
When helping me install a new kitchen in my first flat, he drilled a hole in the wrong place in the stainless steel splashback. The hole wasn’t visible unless you craned your neck around the extractor fan, but he “didn’t sleep a wink” that night from thinking about it.
When we were teenagers on Sunday mornings Dad would go to the grocery store and buy ALL of the marked down “day old” baked goods. ALL. My boyfriend (now husband) used to love to come over because it was the first time in his life he could have all of the cake/cookies/pie/coffee cake/pastries he had ever dreamed of eating. His mom never bought treats(healthy food dictator) so my dad’s philosophy of “more is more” food shopping was a revelation.
My dad’s philosophy of food shopping is still, despite no longer living on a farm, “but we could get snowed in and be unable to get to the store. Let’s get a case.”
Oh, and he does the same thing with the bags of about-to-expire fruit at their local supermarket. Because you can get 1-2 lbs. of produce for a dollar, nevermind that they never go through it all.
My dad nicknamed my sister’s high school boyfriend “the Gorilla”. It was not an affectionate nickname.
When he first met my husband, my dad glared. It took a long time for him to warm up to “that guy who was kissing my daughter”.
My dad scared the bejesus out of PartnerChouffe the first time they met–something about a shotgun shell getting engraved. In hindsight, taking the pacifist, anti-gun, anti-hunting Englishman to my dad’s house (at that point, stuffed to the gills with hunting artifacts, taxidermied critters, antique weaponry, and longbows) may not have been a good way of introducing them. Luckily, they both like whiskey.
My dad’s default Christmas gift is an umbrella. The last one he got me had wind-resistant flaps and came with a lifetime warranty. “Everyone always needs an umbrella,” he always says.
Does it resist the wind? I want a wind-resistant umbrella real bad.
Pop got all of us new umbrellas last Christmas – they were our stocking stuffers.
Once on a family vacation we were all out to breakfast and just sitting quietly enjoying the view of the beach or whatever, and my dad takes a long sip of coffee, goes “ahhhh” and declares to nobody in particular, “god, I love coffee.”
Also a couple years ago my stepmom sent him to the store to buy parsley, and he came back with cilantro. His defense was “it’s basically the same thing.”
That made me spit wine all over my monitor. THANKS.
Oh and one time, one of my friends asked my Dad if he liked the guy I was dating at the time. He looked startled at the idea, and said, “Have you ever seen the film the Big Red One? Lee Marvin says, ‘Don’t ever get to know the privates. They all die eventually’.”
My Dad would then have made a moderately dirty wisecrack about calling my paramours “the privates,” then look uncomfortable, then apologize for the implication because it’s none of his business and he’s not asking.
I loved the Twitter posts and I’m loving the comments here. I lost my dad four years ago suddenly, and I miss so many of his Dad-isms. I still have hanging on my fridge the last thing he mailed me: a Far Side cartoon that he wrote, “Enjoy some dreaded Tofudebeast on your birthday,” on. Calling vegetarian food “the flesh of the dreaded Tofudebeast” was his favorite joke. That and telling us, “They invented language for a reason,” when we would point to stuff at the dinner table. “One grunt: salt. Two grunts: more lima beans.” And then he would laugh. Every single time. It stopped being funny for awhile during my teen years and college (probably because I was a little shit head), but then it got funny again. Oh, and his favorite song used to be Smash Mouth’s “All Star”. I remember once laughing about it, and he got very serious. “It’s an inspiring song, [my first name]. It’s about going out there and trying your best.” OH, DAD.
These are adorable. So sorry about the loss of your dad; I’m glad you have happy memories.
My Dad loves “Legally Blonde.” He really likes the message that she can do whatever she wants with her life and doesn’t have to give up the things that make her happy. My sister was in law school when it came out.
That’s very very sweet and I’m terribly sorry about your Dad. He sounds awesome.
I’m locked on twitter, so I couldn’t send my Dadecdotes directly to Mallory, but here is my dad being the most dad:
– he puts the time at the end of every text message, and always signs it dad
– he sends me pictures of the cormorants that live at the local reservoir, and asks me to confirm that ‘it’s definitely a different one’
– I recently found out that he’d stashed little yokes that you use to check tire pressures in different places in my flat. I have maybe four of these things and I have no idea how to use them, but my dad is so proud of me for thinking that I can I can’t tell him.
– this Easter I overheard my mother telling him that maybe he didn’t need to organise an easter egg hunt for me this year. He sounded surprised and asked why. ‘Because she’s 29.’
– he offered to have someone who was making me sad killed for me, but because he’s a #dad he planned to pay the assassin with a cheque
Also any dude who replied to Mallory with ‘the most dad thing my dad’s ever done is have a kid with my mum’ – you will perish in flames.
“Dadecdotes” YES
Also any dude who replied to Mallory with ‘the most dad thing my dad’s ever done is have a kid with my mum’ – you will perish in flames.
SO MANY of those! Sorry you don’t understand #dads at all, must be a joyless existence making the same joke as everyone else.
I sometimes write my dad’s texts for him; he has sent texts to both my aunt (his sister) and my brother (his son), signing them with his full name and initials
My boss signs his texts. It’s amazing.
No, no- With the sex-with-my-mom replies, they’re just being super sad. People write that because their dads have never done anything more than that to be dad-like! Maybe that’s all they know about their fathers. I don’t have a Dadecdote either.
My old mentor at my workplace would dramatically say, “Oh, hang on! OK, now go,” and would duck behind the workbench or hide behind walls whenever I was working with the dangerous goods. Once saw me telling a new boss not to touch something dangerous and why not and she was kind of miffed. When she left later and more of our team came around, he kept giving this big hearty, proud laugh and telling them, “HAWWHAW HAW, You should have seen that ***lly [our boss]: She was shaking like a RODENT!”
Total exDadgeration.
I bought a house recently, and my parents came to visit and help me shop at IKEA for some furniture. While there, my mom and I tackled the upper floor with all of the displays, while my dad decided his time was better spent downstairs in the marketplace mapping out shortcuts so we could get the most done in the least amount of time. He spent an hour doing this.
Later, back at my place, he not only put together my new IKEA bed and storage cabinet, he then decided to tear up the ugly bushes in my backyard and mulch it and replant some beautiful hostas. He then figured out how to tie my old box springs to the top of the van with the single short rope I had, and hauled it away to switch it out with another set when I realized it didn’t fit with my new bed. I love my dad.
My dad built a hydroponic gardening system out of rubbermaid tubs and PVC pipe to grow tomatoes in the backyard. The plants are truly impressive but you can’t get too close because he keeps a circle of mousetraps on the ground around the system, and monitors them obsessively to see what he catches.
When I was in high school he took the giganitc jar of change that I had been saving since early childhood and used it to buy himself a recumbent bicycle. He said that “if you found those coins in the couch cushions they were mine anyway.”
Last night I talked to my mom on the phone and she said that they just went to a wedding reception where he struck up a conversation with another gentleman about Civil War archaeology which somehow devolved into a loud and embarrassing dispute.
Great, now I’m going to be thinking about Dad Things all day.
-When I moved into my college dorm, he presented me with a typed and framed document of Dad Advice that he wanted me to live by. It was mostly about studying hard and eating breakfast but he also wanted me to remember to “go to every party you’re invited to and some that you’re not.”
-He still cannot believe that I do not wish to own a TV. I tried to explain to him that you can watch TV on computers now but he does not consider this an acceptable TV viewing experience. Last time he visited me he took measurements of my tiny studio apartment and drew up plans proving that you could fit a TV in there.
-He wears swim goggles when chopping onions in order to keep the fumes out of his eyes, and will emphatically offer this advice to anyone he meets.
That last is genius. I may buy myself kitchen swim goggles.
Cried during the Canadian national anthem before a hockey game one time (we’re American)
Cried at the end of “Emma” when Mr. Knightley proposed. Said “you know, BobbieWickham, that’s what you need to be looking for in a husband.”
One time I called and he was home alone eating leftover taco meat with mustard on a piece of bread. He hadn’t microwaved it or anything.
Also food-related: has a deep-fryer in the shed. Will deep-fry anything. There is a lawn chair next to the deep-fryer and a shelf next to the lawn chair for his pipe, tobacco, glass of wine/gin&ginger, and book about British sea power in the 19th century/Robert Ludlum novel.
Also food-related: his signature dish is “Dad’s surprise,” which is some type of pasta (usually elbow macaroni) with a package of italian dressing mix and a bag of frozen cauliflower.
I love him more than anyone else in the whole wide world.
Also food-related: has a deep-fryer in the shed. Will deep-fry anything. There is a lawn chair next to the deep-fryer and a shelf next to the lawn chair for his pipe, tobacco, glass of wine/gin&ginger, and book about British sea power in the 19th century/Robert Ludlum novel.
No. This is too perfect. Can’t be real.
So glad my dad isn’t the only one eating cold weird leftovers. My dad’s signature is cold (whatever seems revolting cold) in the middle of the night, but IN A MUG, you see, that’s what makes it make sense. Obviously you eat cold things in mugs. I don’t think he knows how to work the microwave.
Related to Dad Food, my dad likes to do the following:
– make spaghetti sandwiches, which is simply spaghetti with tomato sauce stuffed in a slice of white bread
– make tomato sandwiches, which is a slice of tomato and mayonnaise in between two slices of white bread
– will boil an entire head of broccoli and eat it alone, as a meal, doused in vinegar and black pepper. He will also do this with cauliflower.
My dad is an engineer, and thinks in Excel, basically. When I was in college he would ask me what classes I was considering taking for the next term as a natural part of our regular conversations. He would go look up what times these classes met, and then he would send me excel spreadsheets that had multiple options for arranging my schedule all graphed out (All morning classes! All not-morning classes! Two free days a week classes!). All unprompted, naturally. It was actually quite helpful sometimes.
dudevolleyball’s dad is like that! except he tried to use Excel to help him with his comedy sketchwriting in college, which was a decidedly worse fit of technology+purpose.
If you would like to know what my parents are doing on any given day, there is a calendar with their schedules on a website my dad hand-coded with HTML and hand-updates every week or so.
This is magnificent.
One of the Dadlier things I love about my Dad is his stock of obscure impressions. He was imitating Georgie Jessel years before Billy West incorporated Jessel’s glued-tongue phrasing into the voice of Dr. Zoidberg.
Dad won’t explain or annotate these impressions at all. He just drops them into conversation as a by-the-way, so that you might not even realize he’s imitating someone. I only discovered a few months ago that his habit of saying “Don’t you think?…or DON’T ya?” in a tart voice is meant to emulate “Mr. Chatterbox,” a George S. Trow* character from The National Lampoon Radio Hour (1973-’74).
*(Trow, now best remembered for writing long-form New Yorker articles, did a brisk trade in catty East Coast types for NatLamp’s weekly radio revue. Mr. Chatterbox, a mildly insane gossip and lifestyle commentator, was himself an imitation of Walter Winchell.)
My dad wears the same thing every day. He is also a professor. A couple weeks ago his students staged “Dr. [Name] Day” in his honor and every single one of them came to class wearing khaki pants and a navy blue polo shirt. He sent me a photo.
Also, he says “It is what it is” often enough that a couple years ago one of his officemates made him a custom plaque that reads “It is what it is” to hang on his wall.
RE: the plaque, only my stepdad’s says “It’s all good” and it was a gift from my brother. Possibly the only gift my stepdad really liked (he is HORRIBLE to buy gifts for)
My mum got a plaque made for my dad to put on the door of his shed (which he built with his best friend in the back garden to do his university work in. It has internet and electricity and is great) that quotes Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It: “Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off”. He was thrilled.
All dads are pains in the ass to buy gifts for. It is the ancestral curse of the dad. (Mine always asks for socks, then doesn’t wear them because “they’re not the same as the old socks.”)
If you got three or four emails about this comment I’m sorry, I have been trying to get it to show up in the correct place.
We need to have a separate thread about Best Dad Gifts so we can all swap ideas.
What a strange coincidence! My (childless, therefore not your dad) boss is a professor who wears khaki pants and a navy blue polo shirt every single day to work. A couple of years ago he tried to get all his employees to wear the same outfit daily.
He is so sweet and dad-ly though. He is always freaking out about people driving safely and taking photos of interesting cloud formations from the hallway windows at work.
“Make me a sandwich.” “POOF, you’re a sandwich!”
Also, he is ON IT for historical airplane inaccuracies in movies.
Speaking of both Airplane!(s) and terrible puns: “Surely you can…” “Don’t call me Shirley!”
EVERY. TIME.
When a family member enters the room, my dad will say, as if in mid-conversation, to whoever he’s with, “Okay, so we’re going to sell [name of person who just walked in]-” and then breaks off abruptly.
When we were little, he would wait until the road was clear when we were out driving somewhere and then swerve about in a supposedly uncontrolled manner.
He ate catfood out of the tin with a fork (I assume it was a washed-out catfood tin with something else in, but never questioned it fully).
He can throw an “invisible sweet” in the air and catch it in a paper bag, with it audibly hitting the bottom.
My dad does the road-swerving thing too!! But only immediately after Mom tells him to drive safe.
Similarly, when my sisters and I were still stroller-aged, on family walks, Dad enjoyed letting go of the stroller at the top of the biggest hill in the neighborhood and going “Runaway stroller!!”
My dad does the road swerving thing, too, but only after someone had told him directionally, “It’s on the right…” or “Turn left here.” “OH, OK, SO TURN RIGHT HERE? WHAT?” *swerves maniacally*
My dad also does the road-swerving thing! He also likes to put his hands up and steer with his knee.
If it were just the two of us in the car when I was a kid, Pop would a) let me sit up front and b) would occasionally take his hands off the wheel and (pretend to, I hope…) close his eyes so I’d have to steer from the passenger seat. Sometimes he’d let me sit on his lap and steer – only on quiet roads, of course. He wasn’t normally a reckless sort of dude but I guess he enjoyed scaring the bejesus out of me.
I like that you know it’s a sweet, and not like, an invisible button mushroom or something.
My dad is certainly very dad-like but I can’t think of an illustrative anecdote at the moment. My father-in-law, on the other hand…
He was supposed to be taking it easy at home after a quadruple bypass when his wife went off to work. When she got back, she discovered that the garden had been weeded and trimmed and whatnot. She went inside and found him sitting on the couch, watching TV. She slammed down her things and went, “WHO WAS OUT THERE GARDENING?” “Elves,” he said, and smiled.
Oohhhh this reminds me of my grandpa. My mom called him one Saturday, as she did every Saturday, to ask how he was doing. “Oh,” he says, “a little hungry.” Why? Because this ninety-year-old man had decided to trim the apple tree on Thursday, fell out of the tree, came back inside and sat in his easy chair, and hadn’t been able to get up since then. Didn’t bother to call anyone or anything, just sat there.
He lived for five more years. But I’m not sure his ears ever stopped ringing from the scolding he got; I didn’t know my mom knew those words until that day.
Wait he was within reach of the phone but didn’t call???
Yep! He didn’t want to worry anyone! He was sure he would be fine! Not that big a deal!
My grandpa was a very, very stubborn man.
My dad likes to clip out articles and mail them to us. If he reads something on-line he will print it out and mail it. He has piles of clippings for every member of the family. My mom can’t throw out any newspapers or magazines until he has had his chance to clip things.
My mom is the newspaper clipper, but my dad likes to describe comic strips to me, usually beginning with “I told Mom she should clip this for you, but in today’s [whatever]…”
The best time was when my husband e-mailed him a link to an article and my dad then printed it out and mailed it to us.
OMG. Dying laughing over here. DYING.
My mother in law does this. We’re the only ones who get the “successful marriage” articles despite the fact that my husband and I are very happily married. I just talk back to my husband, and her daughters don’t.
Oh, and I forgot to mention one thing from my dad’s visit: Apparently my bathroom door squeaks a tiny bit. I hadn’t even noticed because I live alone and no one cares if the door squeaks when I get up in the middle of the night. The morning after my parents’ first night at my place, my dad went out without telling Mom or I where he was going. Ten minutes later, he walked into the kitchen, slammed down a bottle of WD-40, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “FIX YOUR DOOR.”
My dad definitely belongs to the squishy/elbow-patch sweater/wine-drinking/cries at La Boheme class of Dad so I can’t really relate to all the handy-man stuff because he’s never been good around the house (that’s my mom’s province).
BUT he has fallen asleep in EVERY SINGLE movie we have ever taken him to with the ONLY exceptions of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and he was very excited and completely engrossed by the Magic of Cinema and now they are his only two contemporary pop culture touchstones and he brings them up at every opportunity. (He absolutely hated The Hobbit and was asleep by the troll king.) So I think that’s pretty Dad.
My dad rarely took my brothers and me to movies, but he *always* fell asleep in them. We were making fun of him about that a few years ago, and he laughed and said “those were the best three hour naps I ever took.”
My dad would volunteer to read me to sleep when I was a little kid. Minutes later, I would be spotted by my mom happily ambling around the house entertaining myself. Upon investigation, she would discover my dad peacefully asleep in my bed with the book lying somewhere on the ground.
My dad fell asleep during The Matrix. Even with his hearing aids out I don’t know how he managed that.
My dad fell asleep watching The Two Towers in the theater! The best part about that is that he’s a bigger Tolkien nerd than I am (and I’m basically a Tolkien fundamentalist) — didn’t stop him from zonking out.
My dad is both a farm kid handyman and an unabashed crier. My brother and I have both inherited this; my mom was the only one of the three of us who held it together during my brother’s wedding.
Peak Dad for my dad was the year I graduated from grad school and started working at my first real full-time job. He did the following:
1. Presented me with my own fully-stocked tool box in front of everyone at my graduation party. Was clearly delighted with himself.
2. Issued me an invoice on family stationery (that he designed) when he helped me move into my first post-grad school apartment. Said invoice had line items for moving van rental, tolls, gas, and a Dad Moving Surcharge.
(<3<3<3 u Dad)
This is my dad’s favorite Dad Joke:
Me: Did you get a haircut?
Dad: No, I got them all cut.
*rimshot*
That is a classic, right up there with “Hay is for horses” and “Do you know what?” “Yeah, he’s a short little guy.”
Along those lines, I got a lot of, “‘She’ is the cat’s mother” as a kid.
I had a math teacher who would always reply “Yeah, but I guess you can’t guess which one!”
Also:
My dad’s emails are indistinguishable from spam. They generally consist of the subject line “look at this” and a single URL pasted into the body of the message.
I’m a librarian, so sometimes he emails me to get books for him. These are sent with the subject line “request” and in the body “please obtain this book for me” followed by an ISBN number.
*
His general philosophy of childrearing can best be summed up by this advice he often gave to my mom: “Let her bump her head a few times. She’ll learn.”
*
My parents were not the sort to get involved in childhood squabbles. Not everyone in the neighborhood shared their stance, so a friend’s shouted “I’m telling!” was often followed by a mom or dad emerging from a house to scold us about “being nice to Curtis”. (It was always Curtis.)
I thought this was unfair, so one day when I was 5 (in a fit of delusion/optimism) I told my dad, “Kenny’s being mean to me.”
Dad: So go punch him in the stomach.
Me: I can’t do that!
Dad: Why not?
He was cunning, my dad.
*
By seven years old, I could find the water shutoff valve for our toilet.
*
He drove 30 miles out to my apartment in the middle of the night when my brand-new kitten was accidentally trapped in my bathroom.
*
Love my dad. ♥
Dad taught me to mend the constantly-breaking faucet in our old kitchen (I learned how to take it apart, tighten the requisite leaking bits, then put it back together!), and he gifted me with the faucet itself when we remodeled.
I’m a librarian, so sometimes he emails me to get books for him. These are sent with the subject line “request” and in the body “please obtain this book for me” followed by an ISBN number.
My boyfriend’s dad emailed him a few weeks ago to ask him to translate some sections of the Magna Carta into English, so he could see if they were relevant to his campaign for better canoing access.
…
Well, were they?
Your dad is…my mom?
Whenever my dad announces that he is getting or has gotten a haircut, he wants us to ask “which one?”
Does that even count as a joke….if he’s not the one telling it….and he has just trained us from childhood to ask that question??
My dad is a doctor, and I am kind of a hypochondriac. Whenever I call him and am like “so it hurts when I do [thing]” his almost inevitable response is “well stop doing that.”
He has also named the alligators that live in the canal behind our house. (Florida!)
Ooh! Does he also offer to step on your other toe when you complain about having stubbed your toe? “To take your mind off it.”
Mine always offered to amputate. “Oh, you got a splinter in your finger? Better amputate the whole hand, just in case.” “You have a headache? Better amputate – I don’t think you’ll lose anything important.”
Amputate! My partner (a doctor but not a Dad) just says “Oh no, I guess we’ll just have to palliate.”
My dad texts me pictures of the places he’s eating at. And the new cat. Thankfully he has not eaten the new cat.
That…that was a very Dad joke. Are you sure you’re not a Dad?
SHHHHHHH
Does he hold the phone up to the cat for it to say hello though.
When I was in highschool, my dad was concerned that I wasn’t eating enough and so he’d send me to school w/ baggies (multiple baggies) full of pancakes in case I got hungry. He’d make them w/ corn muffin mix that he’d buy in bulk from the dollar store.
JIFFY.
betty crocker actually!
Greatest story ever. I’m so happy picturing this.
Oh, more Dad Things–he was very creative and loved to tell stories and also, I think, loved messing with your head a bit. He’d make up serialized bedtimes stories for us as kids–mine, since I went everywhere with our dog glued to my side, were about a girl and her wolf who lived behind a waterfall and had Adventures.
He also, starting when I was very, very young and therefore gullible (around 2? I think) and continuing on until I was at least 10, would scatter peanut shells in the back of our lawn and along the route we’d take on our weekly just-the-two-of-us Sunday walk, and convince me that they were left there by the invisible elephant who loved to follow us around.
Oh, my dad used to make up serialized bedtime stories too! They were about me and my invisible black cat, Barnaby, who would go everywhere with me, and if there were Mean Boys, Barnaby would run up their pants legs and down their shirts and scratch them to pieces and they’d never know what hit ’em.
My dad also made up serialized bedtime stories based on me (a ballerina with a pesky brother who once glued her into her pointe shoes?!?). Love.
My Dad did serialized bedtime stories too!! They were all Star Wars stories with the various main characters (including Darth Vader, who was good now) on adventures to various planets he made up, like “Zeron” and “Marshmallovia.” (Marshmallovia was literally made of marshmallow.)
My father made up serial stories about a Scottish sailor in the eighteenth century named Alexander Selkirk. I was shocked in high school or college to realize that Alexander Selkirk was a historical figure, though not as far as I know as prone to liberating slave ships as my Dad’s version.
My dad has stood quietly and unfussily by my side through some really awful medical situations and has somehow put his own reactions away so that he could Get Things Done. He will, however, tear up the moment he hears “Wait a Minute” and if a band plays it at a show he will reach across to fistbump me. I go to bluegrass shows specifically for those chances.
That is lovely.
Dad: Oh my god! I forgot to put the glaze on! Wait a minute, don’t eat that last bite, let me get the glaze.
[Dad puts some glaze on my last bite of food, waits expectantly for me to eat it.]
Me: Oh, that is good, thanks!
Dad: Do you want a bottle? I bought a whole case!
DADS!
My dad’s favorite response to the question “how are you?” is “fat & sassy.”
Does he say it in a fun voice? Or totally nonchalantly?
Whenever Prairie Home Companion had a decent band on, my dad would call it a “real toe-tapper”. He loved Car Talk, and quoted My Blue Heaven (“What a great day for a mow!”) or Strange Brew (“Take off, hey”) at least once a day.
Just a few months ago I had to clear time in my schedule to listen to A Prairie Home Companion because my parents were at the live show in St. Paul and they wrote me one of those notes from the audience that Garrison Keillor reads on air.
Friending my coworkers (that he has never met or spoken to) on Facebook. Never knowing how to transfer photos from one device to another. Explaining the rules of Italian cooking/eating (e.g., cheese + fish is a never-do, bread substance + meat or cheese is an always-do, etc.)
Ohh I just remembered another one! It definitely walks the line between dad-ish and completely nuts but when we’d get sick my dad would go around and use a blow torch on any doorknob we’d touch to kill the germs. I told this story to my guitar teacher at the time and from then on whenever I’d come in for a lesson he’d grab a blow torch and start torching the doorknobs ‘to make me feel more at home’. He was kinda like an extra surrogate dad and so I think that story also counts as a dad story.
A few years ago I bought my dad a kit for homebrewing beer, which includes a giant glass jug called a “carboy” that you can let stuff ferment in. He emailed me his account of his first time using it:
Howdy,
I just bottled the vanilla bourbon stout this afternoon. This will be – by far – the most expensive and hopefully the best beer I’ve made to date. What an aroma! But while trying to clean out the carboy, I dropped it on the stove top, and cracked it. The stove top, not the carboy. So, ouch, we need a new stove. Anyway, there’s a dozen set aside for you.
Dad
There are SO MANY. Like I just remembered the time he called me two days after watching Looper with me and said “Wait, did that movie take place in Kansas? And they were growing sugar cane? THAT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE!!!”
That’s right, geographically inaccurate crops were his only issue with a film about time travel in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt somehow grows up and becomes Bruce Willis.
Edit: He also regularly sends me sarcastic/terrible dad joke emails that he has clearly written and signs them “Mom” and he thinks it’s the funniest thing ever.
When I was 12 I asked my dad how you know when a guy likes you. He paused, then said “when he asks you to marry him.”
The daily ritual: come home from work, change into that one pair of jeans, hand-me-down t-shirt and squeaky pair of huaraches, fix a drink, get a dish of peanuts, and settle into the Dad Chair (a huge recliner my mom banished to a spare room with the TV). In my memory there was always a repeat of Nova, or some kind of biology or archeology or wild animal show to watch.
Later we’d sit down to dinner and he would respond to something one of us said with “That reminds of the time…” or “That’s just like X’ without completing the thought. My mom would look at me with pleading eyes, shaking her head “no, don’t do it” but I could never resist the bait. “It’s like what?” I’d say, and my dad would look up, feigning surprise. “Oh, well if you really want to know…” he’d say, before launching into a comprehensive discussion of the topic that would leave us still sitting at the table an hour after my mom and brother had left.
I miss him.
My friend’s dad is obsessed with Apple products and the meteorology. He called her the other day, and asked how the weather was where she lives. She said “Oh you know–it’s raining….” To which he responded by pausing for a couple seconds to look at the weather app on his iPhone and coming back on the phone to say “No it’s not.”
Oh god, now I just want to write them all! He gets cranky about celebrating Christmas but created a longstanding family tradition of celebrating Groundhog Day by eating KFC and drawing pictures of groundhogs! He often jokes about updating his blog despite having only the faintest grasp of how to use the internet! He called me last year and asked if I had heard of Lorde! He called me when Arcade Fire won a Grammy and asked if I had heard of Arcade Fire! His nemesis is the squirrel that tries to get into his bird feeder!
One more – when I was in high school, his favourite joke was as follows: Why is Saddam Hussein named Saddam? BECAUSE HE’S SADDAM UGLY.
Oh man! Last year my dad called me up to ask me “Have you heard of this singer named ‘Adele?'”
Yes, dad. Yes, I have.
The Dadecdotes keep coming back to me even though I replied TWICE to the original tweet.
– My dad heckles Alex Trebek when we watch Jeopardy. Alex Trebek is “pretentious.”
– Actually, my dad heckles any kind of TV, really. One time we were watching the old Batman series with Adam West and Batman made a sexist comment and my dad said “HOLY PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY, BATMAN!”
– When I told my dad I was going to a wedding on my 21st birthday last year he said “I didn’t know you were getting married! HAHAHA.”
– He uses semicolons in text messages.
– Still wears his concert T-shirts from the 80s.
“HOLY PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY, BATMAN!”
Does your dad mind if I steal that one?
Have at it. It’s still one of my favorite things he’s ever said.
My dad gets mad if you water his plants in the wrong order because “they’ll get upset.”
my father
anthropomorphizes
plants.
(his plant-watering ritual also takes 45 minutes. It was a significant day when he learned you can order plants on the internet.)
He also just sent me a care package with ingredients to make pasta and chocolate from a local shop and a little bottle of bourbon with a note that said “Since I can’t take you out for dinner and a drink, I thought I’d send it to you.” No reason, other than that I semi-recently moved to a new city. I love my dad SO MUCH.
My father-in-law:
*Has season tickets to the opera.
*Named his dog Brownie because “she does a heck of a job.”
*Refers to broccoli as a communist plot. To servers.
*Pointed out all the references in the last Star Trek movie to the original Star Trek.
When I was 13 my family went on a month long cross country RV trip. This involved 2 parents and four kids in a truck cab for hours on end. Whenever my dad needed to fart he would announce, in a robot voice: “FART. ALERT. FART. ALERT. ENT. ENT. ENT.” And we would all roll down our windows. He thought this was hilarious of course, and laughed and laughed at himself every time.
This made me laugh, and also I love your name.
Dad liked to watch car races, leaning into the turns in his recliner while quietly making “vroom” noises to himself.
Awww Bless…I can see him now 🙂
It’s the ‘quietly’ that gets me…
That is very much a dad gift. It’s a different flavor of dad, but if we were playing some kind of guessing game entitled “Who gave it?” and you said, “A New Yorker subscription” I think everyone would immediately be like, “A dad!”
This reminded me that my grandfather got me a subscription to National Geographic World for years. That is maybe the most grandfather gift I could ever imagine.
I just got sad remembering the years I got National Geographic from my grandparents. This year was the first christmas without my granddad.
My dad dropped me off at school in the morning and he would honk and wave at every pedestrian we passed
But the dad-est thing he did was hang my just-washed basketball uniform from the passenger side window to “dry” it on the way to my basketball game.
When I watched Monty Python and The Holy Grail for the first time at the age of 22 or so, I discovered that I knew literally every.single.joke (except the ones about sex). My dad had been quoting the ENTIRE movie (again, except the sex parts) to me in bits and pieces throughout my childhood, and yet never once actually showed us any of the movies. I knew he enjoyed Monty Python, but the extent kind of… surprised me. Though, is there ANYTHING on this earth more Dad than Monty Python? I think not.
OMG, THIS. My dad does this with Monty Python and The Jerk, the second most Dad movie ever.
He was so darn pleased with himself whenever I used AAA. For hotel discounts or tows or whatever. He was obviously so gratified to hear about it. I almost with the car had broken down more. (Not really.)
Seriously, AAA is the best use of money ever. Did you know that if you are a passenger in someone else’s car and it breaks down, you can still get towed for free for the first 50 miles? Incredible!
…perhaps I am a bit of a dad.
I got a little sad reading some of these because I didn’t have much of a dad but I did have a grandpa. In high school I ran cross country and every Saturday I had to get up at some ridiculously early hour for meets and there was ALWAYS a full plate of breakfast in the microwave with a paper towel on top that he’d left for me. He regularly made trips to the little gas station across the street so he could leave me these prepackaged cinnamon buns on the kitchen table as a surprise. And on the rare occasion that I slept in, he’d greet me with “8am! Why, half the day is over!”
I love reading these! My dad things:
1. When I was in college, he’d send care packages of christmas lights and fake tattoos.
2. When i was in grad school, he printed out an email I sent him complaining about my students, corrected the grammar and spelling with a red pen, and then mailed it to me.
3. He is obsessed with the game(?) calendar(?) “Fact or Crap?” (One reads a sentence and everyone guesses if it is “fact” or “crap”)
4. Every year in early September, he would gather all the neighborhood kids in front of our house to watch him put up the “back to school” flag. There was a song that went along with it. Then he would point and laugh at us.
5. He used to wake up me + siblings to make us watch Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Grandpa story: My mom’s dad was a firefighter for like 30 years, and once when the volunteer fire department drove past the house, he just shook his head and muttered “pfft, amateurs.”
I am enjoying these, and the twitter ones, immensely.
My dad is a stoic, mid-western, intimidating type dad who is also goofy.
-Hugs me briefly and then balances it out by slapping me hard on the back, like a bro hug. Then my mom yells “Billy, don’t hit her!” Every time.
-Has rescued and painstakingly brought back from the brink of death (I’m talking eye-dropper feeding, creating warming boxes with heating pads in them, getting up multiple times in the night to check on them and feed them): two cats (Buster and Lena), one mouse, and one hairless baby squirrel (Rocky, of course). The squirrel was given to a nature sanctuary once stabilized.
-Makes the whooshing-air noise of bus brakes every time he pulls into the driveway and stops. Laughs every time.
-Also does a thing when he’s driving where he acts like his hands are slipping on the steering wheel, and then at the last second catches it and makes the turn.
-Makes endless Simpsons references. “French toast please” when he forgets something. “Quick, what’s the number for 911?” any time he can find a reason.
My dad convinced me of the following, which I believed until HIGH SCHOOL:
1. Dragonflies will sew your lips shut
2. Cheetos are fried slugs
3. Chicken nuggets are comprised primarily of beaks n’ talons
My dad told me maraschino cherries never digest and sit in your stomach forever! I still sort of believe it.
My dad convinced 6-year-old me that blowing bubbles in your Coke would give you a stomachache. I believed it ’til I was 22 FREAKING YEARS OLD – this was, of course, when I told my husband-to-be to stop blowing bubbles, and why, and he laughed in my face.
Good one, Dad.
Oh man, dad long cons. When I was in high school, we owned a young bull, named Louie, for a few years; but we sold him when he was getting too out of control to a family we knew that had a dairy farm. Several months later, the dairy farmers butchered a cow and sent us tons of meat from it. When I asked where the meat came from, my dad told me it was from Louie. I thought we ate our former pet bull for almost 22 YEARS. It was only last year (20 years after my dad’s death), that my mom told me no, that meat didn’t come from our cow.
My dad convinced my brother that burnt toast “cleaned your teeth”–which I think my brother believed until the ripe old age of 22 or 23. He also told my brother they were going to get doughnuts for breakfast one morning and then drove him to take the high school entrance exam for the local private high school. I’m not sure little bro has ever really forgiven him, and his only excuse when confronted about it is “I just felt so bad that he had to take a test on Saturday! I couldn’t tell him about it! It was too terrible!”
I love your user name!
Thank youuu. I love the original story!
My father told me that I could avoid crying while cutting up onions by cutting the top of the onion off and putting it on top of my head. It wasn’t until SENIOR year of college, when my fellow BIOLOGY major roommates caught me doing this that I realized it was total bullshit.
The most Dad thing mine did recently was about a month ago when my parents came to visit and I was driving them around. It started to rain and he DEMANDED I drive to an auto parts store so he could buy Rain-X. Then we went back to my apartment and in between applications of Rain-X he hung up pictures for me (he needed an entire bucket of parts “just in case”) while watching NASCAR.
Oh Dads!
In typical dad fashion he makes the same jokes all the time. Whenever he sees a newborn, “that one’s still under warrant!” Every. Time.
He also frequently asks over the phone if I saw the funny/politically provocative thing he posted on facebook.
He laughs at his own jokes all the time ( I have inherited this trait).
My dad put away loads of nonperishable food and supplies for Y2K. When the catastrophic collapse of all civilization failed to pass, he began portioning it out in large Rubbermaid containers as Christmas presents to his grownup children. Survival packs, in case.
Okay… this is going to out me to anyone of my friends reading these comments, but I can’t resist:
1. My family keeps kosher but there’s not a good kosher butcher in the town they live in, so they get their meat delivered through the mail. To keep the meat fresh, it’s packed in dry ice. Now, my Dad is not one to let perfectly good dry ice go to waste, so he breaks it up with a hammer and fills old soda bottles with dry ice and filtered water to make his own seltzer. It’s….. surprisingly not bad? But also, don’t do that people. He also mixes this “homemade seltzer” with flat Pepsi to “reinvigorate” the Pepsi.
2. His outfits… oh god his outfits. In high school he was always in the middle of this long project to fix the roof. His roof fixing outfit was: A safari hat, sunglasses, a BELLY shirt that he made himself by cutting an old t-shirt in half (that was covered with rainbow hot-air balloons), cut off jeans, and no shoes so that he could “grip the roof better”. He wore this all day, all summer, regardless of who was over.
3. Makes awkward jokes about the Freudian symbolism of the fact that I met my boyfriend at a fencing club. Sigh…
4. When we had skunks living in our backyard he set up a web-cam to track whether or not they’d been trapped yet. He called it “Skunk Cam” and made us watch it while we were eating dinner.
I could go on, but technically I have to work today
MY DAD ALSO WEARS BELLY SHIRTS. He once promised he would never do it in front of my friends but then within ten minutes of meeting my now-fiance, he changed into one to go out and weed the garden! Ahhhhh.
1) My dad thinks “No matter where you go, there you are,” is both the world’s sagest advice and greatest witticism.
2) Context for this next one: I live in a city in Canada that is slightly colder in the winter than the one where my dad lives.
When I asked for socks for Christmas, my dad went to an athletics store, found an employee who actually had once lived in my city, and asked for a recommendation for the warmest and therefore most appropriate socks for [my city]. They are hot pink and fleece-lined and enormous; they will not comfortably fit inside a single pair of my shoes. He was very proud of this purchase.
That’s my dad, too! He identifies a little too much with Mr. Natural from Zap Comix.
Mine does too! Not always cash, though — I have a credit card linked to my dad’s account for emergencies. If I mention anything that will cost money during the visit, at the end of it he’ll pull me aside and whisper to me to put my car repairs or whatever on his card and not to tell Mom. And sometimes he will just tell me to buy myself a nice dinner. Half the time he will also tear up while whispering. (I don’t usually use the card. But I do sometimes! My brakes need work next week!)
This was supposed to be a reply to ppyajunebug about dads giving us money!
Dad had just watched Moneyball, one of those things that I hear about and I’m like, “WHOA, THAT IS SOME PRIME MARK LOVELACE BAIT.” Other examples Paul Giamatti in general and the German lager Spaten.
Anyway, he’d just seen it and was telling me about how much he loved it on the phone. Suddenly his very deep, Southern baritone softens like it’s the first time he’s seen a fawn. “Oh, Meredith, and Jonah Hill? He was a revelation! Bravo!”
_______
For Christmas last year, he gave me a bag of shredded money that he got as a gift from the Federal Reserve office party. The note on it said, “Got you what you’ve always wanted – a bag of money!”
The same Christmas, he gave my step-mother a vacuum sealed bag of all of his spare change. Her note read, “Let’s add to this together!! :)”
_______
And for the heck of it, Grandfather Norman story:
We were watching the College World Series and suddenly I hear him grunting in anger. “Gnrrrrr. Grmph.”
“Something wrong, Grand?”
“They’re doing The Wave!”
::pause:: “Um….do you hate the wave?”
“THOSE MEATHEADS SHOULD JUST SIT DOWN AND WATCH THE GAME!”
Grandpa Jim watches the Super Bowl until the Budweiser Clydesdales show up in a halftime commercial. He then turns off the TV, because he’s seen the Clydesdales.
My dad always picks me up at the airport. It doesn’t matter what time the flight comes in, if I’ve requested a ride, nothing. I land, turn on my phone, and will immediately see a text saying “i’m in the cell phone lot”. I think in the past ten years he’s missed one flight. Because he had cataract surgery that day.
He said “sorry I couldn’t come get you, they won’t let me drive.”
Flight tracking apps have revolutionized the field of dadness.
Two things leap to mind:
– My dad dug the basement 2 feet deeper through my high school years. It literally took him 3 years plus another year to finish the floor with appropriate drainage.
– When my parents visit me in Seattle from Pennsylvania, whenever we go out to eat, he will always finish the meal by asking the server if they’ve thought of moving the location to their tiny town 3000 miles away.
Oh man, I have to share a comment. While on a road trip with my brother this weekend, he goes “Dad pocket-dialed me again” and I was like “so what, my name starts with an A so I get pocket-dialed probably every other day.” No matter how many times we have told him he needs to get a passcode lock on his iPhone. My brother goes “Well, it left a voicemail. And he farted.” And then I laughed but thought, nahh it was probably just the way the phone was getting jostled around, so he played the voicemail for me and SURE ENOUGH. 15 seconds in, a really distinctive fart. This all made better by the fact that we were driving in the car and my brother has his phone hooked up to the bluetooth in the speakers so this happened in surround sound, driving south on the Jersey Turnpike. After laughing hysterically to the point of near danger we put Hocus Pocus YouTubes on and I sang with Winifred Sanderson.
I am dying of laughter right now.
i’m in a meeting right now and this is killing me. i am doing the silent-shake laugh while twisting my face up trying not to smile.
Congratulations, an entire train car full of people now thinks there’s something wrong with me because of the attempted laugh-stifling I was doing on the way home. This is the best thing. Please tell me he saved the voicemail.
We listened to it twice. I can’t even believe my brother listened to a pocket dial voicemail long enough to get to the moment. “there was just something about this one” said my brother, (perhaps, a most future dad quote)
There is also no way to tell this story out loud in real life that is in any way as funny.
Dad was in hospital with a very serious, potentially fatal health problem. Siblings and I had rushed home from across the country to be at his bedside. Dad is lying in bed with an oxygen mask on and starts making this really strange noise as he is breathing in and out, kind of vocalising his breaths. Gestures feebly to my brother, who, all concerned – these might be Dad’s last words, after all! – leans over to listen to him. Dad shifts oxygen mask off his face and and croaks “Luuuuuke… I am your father” and collapses into giggles.
This may actually be a pre-Dad story. I didn’t witness it, in any event.
In my parents’ first apartment as a married couple, the ceiling in the kitchen was very low. He wanted to see if he could hit the ceiling by jumping. He did. It hurt.
When my mom came to see what all the thudding was about, he told her that he had just jumped up and hit his head on the ceiling. He demonstrated for her, but prudently protected the top of his head by covering it with his hand.
My family’s best pre-Dad story isn’t really much of a Dad Story, but it is a good story. When my mom was about 6 months pregnant with me, the first kid, my dad started painting the nursery. And somehow the paint gave him a nosebleed he couldn’t stop, so they went to the hospital, where they proceeded to separate my parents and try to get my mom to admit that my dad had been using cocaine. They were young lawyers, it was the mid-80s, so I guess that was plausible? But really my dad just had a normal paint nosebleed.
1. For years, whenever he knows I’m calling, he answers the phone “New Asheville Speedway”– the Speedway here in town closed like, 15 years ago.
2. When my parents were building the house they live in now when I was around 6, he:
a) made me a doll cut out of a 2×4 with a jigsaw, complete with sawdust hair and sheetrock screws for eyes,
b) used to hand me the punchouts from the metal junction boxes all over the house and say “they’re construction nickels!” and I actually tried to buy some candy at a store with a pocketful of those things
3. I built two woodstrip canoes with him as a father/daughter project in high school, and people always ask “how long does it take to make one of those things?” to which he ALWAYS responds “about 24 cases of beer”
4. He’s seriously the most level-headed calm person I’ve ever met in my life, but he loathes automated phone prompts where they ask you speak your selection as he has a bit of a southern drawl, and it never fails that in about 30 minutes he’s screaming at the phone “OPERATOR, I WANT TO SPEAK TO THE G-DDAMN OPERATOR!”
5. Always makes fun of local car commercials, and will joke about them YEARS after they’ve gone off the air.
6. The only things he knows how to cook are: Texas-style chili, any kind of BBQ on the grill, and cornbread. That’s it.
I just got so involved in Dadness that I missed my bus stop. I don’t know where I am, but I can’t stop laughing.
I got drunk on whiskey sours at my brother’s wedding rehearsal dinner and threw up after we got back. Drinking is a family activity, so after some playful ribbing from my siblings and my mom, I took my leave for the evening. My dad came into my room soon after. He greeted me with, “Howya doin’, kiddo?” and then sat down and explained the entire physiological process of alcohol affecting your body and why your body throws it up after a certain point. Of course, I was still drunk so I only have a fuzzy recollection of his explanation. But I’m not too worried, I’m sure I’ll get to hear it again many times over the course of my lifetime.
Every time I call him to tell him about a cockroach I majestically killed he gives me the same 15 minute lecture about the different kinds of cockroaches that are native to North America and their respective reproductive rates. It’s always riveting!
When my little sister wore low-rise jeans for the first time and he thought they were too revealing, he pulled his jeans down so his underwear was showing. He walked/danced around the house until she got so embarrassed, she pulled her pants up.
For Father’s Day a couple of years ago I asked my dad what he wanted to do thinking it would be along the lines of BBQing or going to a baseball game. His response: “See some goats”. So we spent the day driving to the top of a mountain and pondering mountain goats.
He also watched VH1 Top 10 music videos every morning when my sisters and I were in high school so he could be the cool dad who knew Black Eyed Peas songs.
So many Dad things…
Whenever the annoying songs for Jared Jewelers came on the radio, with the woman singing “ohhh that’s Jared!” my dad would shriek, “AAAAAAHHH NOT JARED!” in the same pitch.
When teaching me to shoot a shotgun, the first time I hit a clay pigeon, said “good. You hit one. Our next goal is to get you to hit another one.”
Is the only reason there is a toaster or a coffee grinder in my house. He bought them at Wal-mart the first night of his first visit.
During his second visit to my house, immediately took apart my dishwasher to find out why it wasn’t draining properly and fixed it.
Once asked me if I’d ever done donuts in a parking lot after a snowstorm. “No, Dad, you raised me and [my brother] to be wimps, remember?” “Oh yeah.”
My dad is kind of a shit, but I do have a few good Dad stories, in the spirit of things.
For example, he will watch Day of the Jackal (the original one) until almost the very end, for the following one-liner: “I didn’t know which phones to tap, so I tapped them all!”
He is known for causing explosions by brewing his own beer/kvass.
He is convinced that going about barefoot or with a bare throat causes pneumonia.
my dad pointed out that my dress (which had a lace overlay over a slip) had “holes in it.”
my dad asked me if i was scared during the elephant graveyard scene in the lion king and asked if i wanted to hold his hand. when i said no, he said that he was scared and wanted his hand held.
my dad, every time we visited a vista point, would drive riiiiight up to the edge while my mother and i screamed and cried.
my dad, who ruined my netflix recommendations by watching nothing but nicolas cage, jason statham, and korean revenge action movies.
dads dads dads
And to make sure that you hadn’t been eaten by any of that wildlife!
My dad let me wake him up at two in the morning to kill a spider I found in my bedroom (I was fifteen), and taught us all to shoot a gun on childhood camping trips. He also made us sweep out the tent every morning because cleanliness Builds Character.
My dad started calling us animal names instead of our real names (I got “Monkey”, my step-brother got “Dog”, etc). Then these got changed to meats, “Hey dog meat! Get in here!”. Somehow or another mine evolved into “geez” (with a hard G, as in “geezer”). I’m still geez.
Years ago, in an email correspondence with my brother that I copied my dad on, I mentioned that I had gotten “mad props” at work. My dad called me in a panic, wondering if I was ok. He thought I was about to get fired, because people at work were mad at me.
My dad has an elevation map of the entire island of Manhattan and elaborate plans to build a gravity-based public transit system for it.
That is SUPER Dad.
Yes. That and his rotation of three tunes (or four bars each of three tunes) that he’s been whistling for my ENTIRE LIFE are probably the daddest things about him.
Once when I lost a tooth but he thought I was too old to still get money for it, he typed up a form letter from the tooth fairy. Was so proud of this joke that he posted it on some message boards in the early 90s, and now if you Google the wording you can find the same letter on a million “humor” websites. He is very happy with this contribution to the world of dad-jokes.
I mean I think we definitely need a link to this letter.
Definitely.
I think it might be this one! http://fun.twilightwap.com/joke.asp?joke_id=909
Even if not, I think it has an undeniable hint of Dad about it.
Yup, that’s it! Sorry for all the suspense.
It resists the wind pretty well! It has yet to turn inside out, although I haven’t taken it into a hurricane or anything. It’s this one: https://www.bluntusa.com/products/BLUNT-XS-Metro-…
OMG, it even has a Car Talk allusion in the product description. It is thus the ultimate Dad Gift.
My dad didn’t trust my address at college, so he sent me an envelope containing a single sheet of paper that said “THIS IS JUST A TEST” to make sure that my mail actually got to me.
He also enjoys texting me mundane updates of hockey games we’re both watching. “Lundqvist just made a save.” I know dad, I saw it too. This took a turn for the more absurd last week when he started texting me the events of a game that he was watching that originally occurred in 1994. “Bure didn’t make his penalty shot!” Dad, we both know who won this game. This game was won twenty years ago.
Just remembered! My dad would do the old Vaudeville “NIAGARA FALLS! Slowwwly I turned… step by step… INCH by inch… and then I GRABBED ‘EM” routine to us as kids, which would never fail to whip us into a nervous frenzy. He would later repeat this with our dog, getting the same result, and remark that we didn’t need to stick around the house anymore because he had a replacement ready.
THIS. EXACTLY.
My parents were buying me a new tent, but dad would make the purchase until he knew I could put it together by myself. He made me do it right there in the store. Every time a salesperson came by, he was like, “No. She’s got it.”
My dad had a job interview at a hip, fratty young company full of twentysomethings. It was the type of company where they had Nerf guns lying around the office.
Interviewer: So, like, what’s your favorite movie?
My dad: Anne of Green Gables. Definitely.
*long silence*
He didn’t get the job.
My dad once pretended to drive off a cliff, ignoring the screams from me and my brother. We couldn’t see from the back seat that there was in fact a road there.
One of my dad’s favorite jokes: you’d ask him what that book was about, and he’d say, “Oh, about 300 pages.”
His other favorite joke: the one about moose turd pie. My husband and I still say “BUT GOOD!” to this day in his honor.
“But good! But good!” was a family dinnertime chorus for yeeeears before I was old enough to be told the joke.
Wait, I don’t think I know this moose turd pie joke! Please tell it?
My dad would play his college fight song every Saturday in the fall and he and I would parade around the house, singing “Hail to the Victors” while my mom would stand by in her Ohio State gear.
I miss him every day.
One time I came home and my dad was watching another WWII documentary on the History Channel and I looked at him and said, “At this point, is there anything you DONT know about WWII?” He paused for a second and then said sliiiiiightly sheepishly, “Well… there’s probably SOME stuff I don’t know…”
He saw Saving Private Ryan like 4 times in the theaters, rewatched it constantly, watched Band of Brothers a bunch of times, read all the books, watched The Pacific, read all of those books, read a few more memoirs/diaries of soldiers, plus has seen (I’d guess) every TV documentary on it since we got cable in like, 1992.
Suffice it to say, I do not believe him. WHAT ELSE COULD THERE POSSIBLY BE TO LEARN????
I love it though. What a dad thing. <3
My uncle runs a heating and air conditioning company about 4 hours from where my dad lives. I live about a 12-hour drive from my dad. At least once a year, he gets AC filters at a good deal from his brother, drives 12 hours, and puts them in my basic window air conditioner.
(Really most of my dad stories can be summed up by his driving an inordinate distance for whatever it is. A couple summers ago he decided to go drive a tour bus in Alaska, so really just…driving.)
Also my father-in-law, back when restaurants usually had smoking sections, would get asked “smoking or non?” and terrify the unsuspecting host/ess by replying “cancer emphysema heart disease” very rapidly and letting that stand as his answer to the question.
Because grandpas are dads too – mine would sneak outside every Thanksgiving to test the air in all of our tires and clean our windshields with that fancy water-repellent spray. Occasionally he would even borrow our keys and fill the tanks with gas.
I lost my dad when I was 18 and I love reading these dad stories. He was a one-off, but still indulged in the following dad-ly activities:
When I was a kid, he convinced me that the Clean Plate Club was a real place, in Missouri (we did not live in MO), and that my membership would be revoked if I didn’t finish eating.
He was a musician and worked nights, and would have me or my mom tape his shows for him so he could watch them the next day (classic dad selections like NYPD Blue, MST3K, etc.) If we missed a taping, we could expect to be on the receiving end of some serious dad-pouting.
He also used to tape Jeopardy! every afternoon so he and I could watch it together when I got home from school.
He subscribed to some sort of punsters’ magazine, the name of which I’ve forgotten, and would often submit his own puns.
And finally, he was a bolo tie enthusiast.
My dad is having a medical procedure RIGHT NOW. My mom emailed us this morning — he had called her from a bench in the hallway outside the doctor’s office, waiting for the receptionist or any employees to arrive, because he was so early the office wasn’t open yet.
My dad is always early for everything. Back in the day when we flew Southwest we would always get placards 1-4.
He also does a thing no one else has mentioned yet, which is sit in his recliner chair and watch those oldies doo-wop/rock’n’roll concerts that PBS televises. Like he’ll just sit and watch the Doobie Brothers or whoever, all night.
Ok 2 dad stories
1. After coming home from my first dance in junior high (which I should mention was a swing dance) my dad asked if I danced with any boys. I said with the straightest face and fair bit of sarcasm because I was 13, “No Dad, I only danced with girls” (this was not true and was fully intended as a joke answer). He said, “Ok, well I’m glad you had a good time” and left it at that. I never bothered to clear up his willful misunderstanding.
2. When my mom was pregnant with her first child my Dad taught himself how to juggle because he thought that knowing how to juggle was a critical part of being a good father.
Growing up my stepdad would always say “Have fun, but be good.” Once I left for college it changed to “Have fun, be good, and don’t do anything stupid!”
aww, this reminds me of my grandpa (subspecies of dad, so it counts). his parting line to me was always “be a good girl, have a good time,” to which I was supposed to say, in mock indignation, “grandpa, make up your mind!”
This summer we went through my grandma’s old things and my dad made me take her old screwdrivers, hammer, and other assorted tools. When I protested that he’d already given me a perfectly serviceable toolbox several years before. He said, “yeah, but these are made from higher quality steel”.
You guys, I live in southern AZ and the last time my dad came to visit we went to Tombstone on the way to Bisbee. I thought he would like it but it is VERY tourist-y, so I was like “we’ll just stop in for an hour and then be on our way!” Nope. It was definitely the highlight of his trip. I’ve never seen him so happy. He bought himself and my husband matching cowboy hats.
Next time, arrange for a visit that includes Hotel Congress on Halloween. Now there’s an unforgettable historical-Southwest experience! : )
My dad… man:
– Scheduled cross-country road trips (Kansas to North Carolina and Virginia) to ensure that we’d a) miss rush hour at all times and b) hit Krispy Kreme when the donuts were hot.
– Had throw jumper cables in his car like a crooked cop had throw pistols. He’d just give them out, because everyone needs a set of jumper cables.
– Would always give me a case of motor oil and a box of blank VHS videotapes for Christmas.
– Had three TVs with three VCRs and would work out a recording matrix for all of his shows. He’d wait until summer to watch them.
– Would take care of my dog on the Fourth of July, as he lived in a fireworks-free area. As my mom was always at NEA National Convention on July 4, it would just be him and the dog. He would barbecue (making sure to do something for the dog… usually a chicken breast but he pulled a squirrel for her one year) and they’d eat and listen to music in the backyard.
– Loved movies, liked to own copies of his favorite movies, never opened any of the DVDs or videotapes.
– Accumulated life insurance policies. In addition to his big policies, he had a raft of those $5,000, start a bank account/new job/whatever else, pay $20 a year policies. He had a lockbox with all of the policy information in it, in alphabetical order.
– He had a heart attack shoveling snow about eight years ago. I’d planned to come out and help, but he’d apparently decided to get a jump on it so we could go straight to the out for breakfast part of the day. He didn’t get a chance to finish, which would’ve pissed him off something fierce.
Oof. Sounds like you had a great dad.
Dad was pretty awesome. He was really focused on being a better father than his dad. Given that his dad set up a franchise family that he lived with in another state during the week and came to visit my dad’s family on the weekend (eventually doing the King Lear thing and moving from one daughter’s house to another until his death,) it wasn’t that hard.
Every year of my childhood, my dad would decorate my birthday cake with anything I wanted. The summer of 1998, though, I was away at camp for the weeks preceding my birthday, so I didn’t request anything in particular. (That date is important.)
Taking advantage of my not being home, he built an entire scale model of the Titanic, which he then sank into a cake with blue frosting. He finished decorating it with ice floes from the board game Polar Dare and my sister’s Polly Pockets. It was the most spectacular thing I’ve ever seen.
Thank you everyone for sharing your dad stories. I lost mine fairly suddenly 3 years ago, and this thread is making me cry, in a good way, at my desk. Dads. *teary smile*
My dad never hangs a picture without measuring tape and a leveler. He likes to be precise. It kills him that I’ll usually just eyeball it.
He cannot (will not?) cook. He’ll complain if my mom’s not around and he has to have cereal for lunch/dinner. He can, however, grill things.
He loves pimento cheese on Ritz crackers. This is something I do not understand.
Sometimes when I’m visiting for the weekend, he’ll fill up my car’s gas tank and take it to the car wash without telling me.
He built his own AR-15 rifle from parts he bought at gun shows (another thing I do not understand). I asked him why he needed an AR-15, and he responded, “For the zombie apocalypse.”
My dad can be kind of a weirdo, but he’s a pretty awesome dad.
My dad loved pimento cheese. My sister has been trying to find some for years in his honor but can’t find it in our area.
He also used to put peanuts or corn nuts into his Dr. Pepper. He liked the salty kick it added.
Oh my god, you guys, I just love everyone’s dads so much. I wish we could have a big dad conference where all of these dads and those with dad-ish tendencies could get together and just dad to their hearts’ content. And I wish those of us with awesome dads could lend ours out to those with not-so-nice dads so they could experience all the love and dad-jokes.
If I’m visiting them, my dad does the slipping twenties thing, “for cab fare from the airport.” But he always, always gives me rolls of quarters for laundry. He saves and rolls the quarters himself, obviously. Also the last time he visited me he fixed my wobbly footrest: “NO WONDER YOU COULDN’T FIX THIS JENNIFER, YOU NEED ALLEN WRENCHES NOT A PHILLIPS HEAD!”
Whenever we get in the car, my Dad says “Contact!” and waits for me to say “Contact!” back (I think that’s a NASA thing?)
Also, when I was in college he routinely mailed me frozen meat. One time he sent me a pre-cooked ham. I thought that was kind of crazy, but then my friends came over and picked it clean, so it turned out to be a good gift!
I was born at an ungodly hour of the morning, so when I went away to college, my dad would wake up so he could call me on my exact birthday, ostensibly to pay me back for waking him up so early X amount of years before, but really because he wanted to be the first one to wish me a happy birthday. He’s been dead for almost eight years and I always get a little sad on my birthday because I don’t get that call.
I remember the report card day where I came home and announced, “I got all As and A minuses!”
Dad: Well, maybe it’ll be all As next time.
ouch. I once got “what happened to the other 10 points” after I reported the PHENOMENALLY HARD-FOUGHT accomplishment of a 90% on a math test.
ouch!
I fell off my bike onto my face (I know…) and ended up with a black eye and terrible scrapes down my cheek. While walking around at a hardware store a few days later, we passed by some people and my dad said “WATCH IT OR I’LL HIT YOU IN THE OTHER EYE.” Haha, Dad. Haha.
My father-in-law is a goofy, skinny Yorkshireman and retired political journalist/editor (Thatcher personally detested him); after he and his wife retired, they bought a B&B in Whitby and made a fortune and retired for-real when they were in their early 50s. Basically, he’s Basil Fawlty with a northern accent.
He took PartnerChouffe along on a work trip once when PC was eight or so. The hotel had a second-run movie theater inside it. Not being the most tuned-in of fathers but having some idea of what PC was into at that point, he asked PC if he liked aliens and Star Trek and Mr Spock (“Yeah! Yeah!” says PC). They go to a movie. The movie is ALIEN. PC has never quite been the same.
FIL visited us last fall and named our hideous concrete backyard fountain that’s too heavy to move. She’s now Maudlin Madge, the Michigan Mermaid.
On the same trip, he and PC shared a plate of brains while his wife and I looked on, appalled. This happens EVERY TIME we have a meal together: they’ll eat something repellent, we’ll watch in horror, they’ll try to kiss us, we’ll run yelling.
Despite having been a quite well-respected journo in younger years, getting emails from him is an exercise in patience, as he apparently has stopped believing in punctuation, grammar, or capitalization since retiring.
hey, my dad’s a former journalist too! but I’m actually just totally threadjacking to say I LOVE YOUR NAME (& the beer that I’m quite sure inspired it).
IT SURE DID. Give me Hops Gnomes or give me death.
Whitby! Insert love letter from me to Hilda and Hild here. Read it, if you haven’t yet.
Also, Alien ≠ Star Trek!!!! Ouch.
Heck yes! I LOVED Hild. Looking forward to the next one.
Spelling is for sub-editors. Finding the story is for journalists.
My sister was planning her wedding, and our dad was looking over the preparations, increasingly alarmed. Finally, he sees an opportunity for cost reduction!
“Honey,” he says, the voice of sweet reason, “Do you really need the big white dress? You’re only going to wear it once!”
We were in one of those neverending lines at Disneyland quite a few years ago. I think it was Thunder Mountain Railroad. We all got incredibly bored so he started waving hysterically at people walking by us in the distance shouting “John! John! Hello, John!” A few people inevitably were named John and waved back.
He is fond of saying, “I’m the gosh darned pater familias” as a G-rated edited O Brother Where Art Thou reference.
He saw Broken Arrow (while in theaters!) and still makes constant reference to anyone who will listen that he looks like Christian Slater, when in reality he is quite bald and in his late 50s.
My (Canadian) dad wrote a book of poems about the US Civil War, in dialect (which he ran by my mom and I to check for consistency, and nearly had an aneurysm when I told him to make sure that black bears were native to Maryland). To do research for this, he took a bit of a holiday after a work trip to the states to tour battle sites, and, out wandering at I think Antietam at five in the morning, nearly got arrested by a very baffled state trooper, who figured there was no way he was up to anything but shady business. He also wrote a collection of poems about WWII fighter pilots in training. And he was Very Into the Kennedy assassination when I was younger, and has shelves of books on conspiracy theories about it.
After he had his gallbladder out, I made him a stuffed gallbladder a la I Heart Guts. He has since named it bil, developed a dialect for it, and occasionally emails me as bil in this dialect with photos of bil out doing groceries with him, or watching a movie, or whatever. I never thought he’d take such a shine to the thing.
oh, a couple more!
Dad and I were the night owls in our house, so we’d sit up watching Saturday Night Live together in the 1970s, before remotes or cable. When something he thought was inappropriate for me came on, he’d just turn the TV off for a few minutes and we’d sit there and wait for it to be over. Note, I was so young I never understood any of the inappropriate things I glimpsed during this.
He also liked Paul Shaffer. Not so much Letterman, but Paul Shaffer specifically.
Once my parents had been out doing something, and when they got home, Dad gave me a toy truck. It was used and had an obvious ding in it. He told me they found it by the side of the road. BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD. It took me 20 years to realize they probably had been to the “thrift store.” LOL. Dad stories.
When I was a little girl and we went out for dinner, Dad would always give me the cherry from his whiskey sour. When I was ~35, if he ordered a whiskey sour, he would still offer me the cherry.
Dad was always proud of me, and always for unexpected reasons. When I was a weird little kid ordering snails or frog’s legs in restaurants, he was proud of me for that.
When some dear friends offered me their summer house furniture for my new apartment, Dad and I went over to collect it. The gentlemen neighbors saw me getting ready to heft the clunky table and blurted “Oh, no, Miss Emily, it’s awful heavy, you should let your father do that!” My rail-skinny Dad and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. Dad assured them “She’s strong!” He was proud of that, too.
When I’d visit them, Dad used to slip me a little cash money once in a while. Usually it was a $20, sometimes it was a $50, once or twice a $100. Sometimes specify what I could use it for: he’d say “for your cab fare” or “to tip the driver” or “for dinner on the road” or—my favorite—”spend it on something silly.”
Dad used to cook dinner every Sunday while Mom would take a nap or read a book in their bedroom, several stories up. When we moved to a one-story house, where she could hear his incessant swearing as he tried to heat canned foods without incident, Mom decided Sundays weren’t so relaxing anymore. (We eventually moved to Sundays being “fend-for-yourself” nights, but I’ll never forget Dad calling out “EVERYTHING I TOUCH TURNS TO SHIT!” while trying to heat up canned chili.)
Dad made up little songs and jingles every single day, and especially when he was driving.
Dad once asked my (middle) sister quite seriously whether she saw any signs of creeping dementia in him. “Do you think I’m losing it?” She responded “Dad, how would we know?” He found this answer reassuring.
When there was only one grandchild in the the family, Dad christened her “The Smart Baby.” I finally pointed out that he’d better stop calling her The Smart Baby before someone else had a kid, because it wouldn’t do to have two grandchildren known as The Smart Baby and The Other Baby. He was receptive to this logic.
Dad loved Egg McMuffins. Loved them. But only in theory. In practice, he was almost always disappointed by them. But he kept making special trips to the drive-thru, so strong was his faith. I have a great Dad-in-hospice story to tell about an egg sandwich, but I can’t bear to cry right now, so it will have to wait.
Dad, who spent the last decade+ of his life hampered by CPOD, loved that Mom kept traveling even though he couldn’t. He would promise her he’d be fiiiiiiiiiine, just go! And almost always, he’d call me in the first 24 hours after she left to help him with some seemingly small task he just couldn’t manage. The one that stands out in my mind is the time she left for the airport and maybe three hours later he called to ask me to come over and change his sheets: he’d celebrated his solo lifestyle by going to bed to watch TV and bringing A WHOLE GLASS OF ORANGE JUICE, and then upended the entire glass into the bed without even taking a sip.
About a month before he died, during a long cold rainy stretch when I was spending a lot of time commuting between his home and mine, Dad left me a voicemail on my old machine telling me he “just called to check in, and to tell you we love you. I keep thinking of you at the bus stop. Keep dry in the rain… and out of the rain.” I kept that message for months. When I moved and had to unplug the machine, the message erased, which is just as well. I still think about it a lot.
The Dad-est thing that my Dad ever did, he didn’t even do. I kept a secret from him so his last days wouldn’t be filled with a terrible anxiety… the anxiety about the mail getting slightly damp.
I miss him every day.
Awwwww.
Onions! Onions EVERYWHERE! Also, large clouds of dust!
My Dad and I recently had the following conversation on the phone after he offered to fly me home to go to my parents’ church’s women’s retreat, which happens to fall on the weekend of my birthday:
Me: “I’ve already made plans for my birthday.”
Dad [sighing his utter dejection]: “I guess, I’ll have to celebrate your birthday by myself then.”
Me: “Dad, it’s the WOMEN’S retreat. You’d have to celebrate alone anyway.”
Dad: “Hmmm… you may have a point.”
My dad used to randomly come into my room and say “Good luck, we’re all counting on you.” A quote from the very dad movie Airplane.
Also he says gesundheit instead of bless you.
My initials are H.A.T. Back in 1996, right before my college graduation, my dad had six baseball caps made that said, in white and red stitching, “HAT 96” and had six of my family members wear them to my graduation ceremony. By far the most Dad thing — and also the most meta thing — my Dad has ever done.
During Operation Desert Storm, my dad had to go do his Air Force reserve service at Wright-Patterson air force base in Ohio, so he made himself a sweatshirt that said “Operation Dayton Storm”
I love reading these!
I’m pretty lucky I have two dads in my life – my stepdad is the sports fan trivia nerd, my dad is the handyman outdoorsy kind. Also one of the guys who picks up our stuff for the bank is Dad to the highest degree and every week it’s a barrage of Dad Jokes and checking that I’m not working too hard. I’m never sure if I’m flattered or not that he’s dadding me like that, but at least it’s not creepy in a sexual way. Just dad jokes and bad puns.
Whoa, late to the game, but my dad is so weird and funny. When he was in high school, his class had a book that each child had to write something nice about their classmates in. There were two girls he didn’t really know, so on their pages he wrote ‘Harch’ and ‘Melton’. He now calls me Melton almost every time we talk on FB messenger, where he is VERY liberal with his sticker use.
He also will still chase me around the house moaning like a zombie, and it still freaks me out.
His favorite thing to do is go up in his computer room where his guitar is, and plug his guitar into the speakers and play along with songs on YouTube. He’s scary good at the ‘Game of Thrones’ theme.
Also Buzzfeed is on board: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicamisener/dad-stop-y…
Oh goodness. Family road trips: My dad would make these elaborate itineraries, complete with daily timeline, directions to each place, details of reservations complete with cost and contact information, fees for parking, ticket prices, contact information for every attraction we were to visit. Just pages and pages. The amount of detail that went into them, I can’t really properly explain. And then he would mail a copy to all of our relatives so they would know where we would be at any given moment, at any time of day and how to get in touch.
His true loves: Coca Cola, candy bars, & Alabama Football. He always had a candy drawer or a drawer with secret candy in it. As a child, I would visit him at his law office and steal away to the break room to raid the file cabinet full of every tiny candy bar, all of them, and down a peewee coke, and then walk back to his office nonchalantly, pockets bulging, eyes glazed over from the sugar rush and face covered in chocolate. He never said one word.
At least once a week my dad texts me a picture of the XM radio in his car, letting me know what he’s listening to. Some of the most recent pictures were Rufus – You Got the Love, Janet Jackson – Rhythm Nation, TLC – No Scrubs, and Kate Hudson – Cinema Italiano. Sometimes there is brief note, like “Janet Jackson”, but usually not. Dad.
I’ve started dragging my dad to hockey games with me and he gets upset when they don’t play well, but then by the time we get home (or at least by the next morning) all he’ll remember is “I’m so glad we can do this together, I had a great time just being with you.” I get a variant of that speech every time. 🙂
Also my whole childhood every time we visited my grandparents in their apartment building, he’d say “everybody out of the pool” when the elevator doors opened. And “sounds good since you had it fixed” every time someone coughs.
My parents have had a mouse problem recently (despite their four cats and one dog – clearly, these are unintelligent mice). My dad put a have-a-heart trap out for the most recent mouse, baited with a peanut butter covered ritz cracker. When he caught the mouse, he took it out to the woodpile in the backyard and left it there, with the original bait peanut butter cracker AND, because he felt bad for taking it out of its nice, comfortable, warm spot under the oven, gave it a few more crackers for good measure.
My dad used to always sing the thermos song from “The Jerk” to me. “Ooooh, I’m picking out a Thermos for you.”
He’s the greatest
I called my dad once in the middle of the night tripping balls. When I told him the reason I’d phoned, he laughed and said “Well, at least you’re not pregnant.”
My dad is more of a hillbilly-who-loves-to-trick-his-kids type. When we were little and would ask to go somewhere, he would say “Sure, go wait in the car” with no intent to go anywhere, we would sit in the car for ages, hoping that this time we were really going.
See also: hurts donuts.
The other day my dad asked if I’d seen American Hustle, a movie we saw together in theaters.
Also, he signs all his e-mails “Love Neil Dad,” I guess in case I’m too cool to call him dad, but I’m not sure who this Neil guy is?
When I was little my dad would organize huge scavenger hunts for my birthday parties. We live on a farm, so we have a lot of land to spread it out over. One year it was King Arthur-themed and he started it by posing as a dying knight (wrapped in a brown sheepskin and carrying, somehow, a real sword) and even left one clue in a bottle in the middle of the pond, a la Lady of the Lake. Another year he decided we needed to exercise our math skills, so every clue was a fairly elaborate math problem that we had to solve to find the next one. I remember at one point we were deeply confused because our calculations kept giving us a negative number. Turned out he’d buried the clue.
He insists on calling my sister “dog” and texting her in a weird dad-approximation of “hip” slang.
He awards the title of “favored child” based on who has most recently gotten the best deal on a purchase that would usually be expensive. My sister was favored child for YEARS because she managed to find a prom dress for $30.
When anyone visits during the summer, even when I visit (and as I don’t live far away, I visit often), he takes them on a “garden tour” and tells them in exhaustive detail about the progress of his various vegetables. He also keeps an elaborate spreadsheet tracking how much of my parents’ food comes from his garden during the summer.
Whenever we go anywhere, he quotes some portion of the lines “Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock because that poem in its entirety was the content of the first letter my mom ever wrote him.
Okay, this sounds like a creepy foretelling of what I will be like as a parent – a mash-up of things my dad does and things I’d do. Hi, Future Child!
My dad quotes that specific bit from Prufrock too! Not for any heartfelt reason though.
Mine did it because he had a college-humor cartoon of two surgeons ready to operate, one saying to the other, “Looks like an evening spread out against the sky, doesn’t he.” I wouldn’t call it heartfelt, but it was a reason.
Mine too! Actually both my parents do it out of English professor nerdery, but I am positive that my dad started it and my mom just goes along with it to be a good sport.
It took me a while to see past my very goofy dad to the tall stern guy that a lot of other people see. One of my favorite dad-isms happened because (*gasp*) his kids were old enough that he was now training their peers for his very serious job. In fact, the guy he was training was Charlie, my friend’s exboyfriend, and friend of my boyfriend’s older brother (the world is small indeed), so I got to hear both parts of the story. My dad, upon learning that the young man he is training had potentially broken the heart of his daughter’s friend, asks her very seriously, “Do you want me to fail him? I’ll fail him for you.” She laughed and reassured him that he was allowed to train the guy. Then boyfriend’s brother asks Charlie, “How is it working with Mr. Gart?” Charlie: “He’s an asshole.” Pause. “He’s great at his job, but still kind of an asshole.”
He also likes to pretend little kids’ ears are rotary telephones. (“brng brng, hello? hello?”), but he hasn’t had a chance to do that one in ages.
When my dad wants me to go to a particular website, he won’t just say “Amazon.” It’s always “Double you double you double you dot Amazon dot com.”
When my family moved me into my college dorm, my (pharmacist) dad gifted me with an entire bin of OTC vitamins, cold medicine, painkillers, band-aids, etc. He then teared up, quickly hugged me, stuffed $20 in my hands, and took off down the hall. Later I went to take my vitamins and found ANOTHER $20 in one of the containers. I’m pretty sure the dad memo says, “$20 bills = love you can’t quite bring yourself to talk about; distribute as needed.” But, yes, with more puns.
I think moving your child into her college dorm, hugging her and then basically RUNNING away is another very Dad Thing because mine did the same thing. I remember being hurt that he just grabbed my mom and left so quickly until I was talking to my mom on the phone later and she said he hadn’t wanted me to see him cry.
My dad used to always sing the thermos song from “The Jerk” to me. “Ooooh, I’m picking out a Thermos for you.”
Dad! So much dad. Where do I begin?
– Loves golf. Lives opposite a golf course and takes great satisfaction in collecting all the stray golf balls that land on his front lawn.
– Cannot make himself a cup of tea or coffee without singing “Right! said Fred. Let’s have a cup of tea”
– Calls text messages emails. He knows what the correct word is, he just won’t train himself to use it.
– Remains flabbergasted at how quickly I reply to his emails (texts)
– Lives near the waterfront and will regularly approach people who are fishing there (usually other Dads) and have long, involved conversations about Fishing.
– Scandalised by any alcohol beverage that costs over $6 from the bar.
– Cannot allow me to leave for an overseas trip without presenting me with an envelope stuffed full of cash in the destination-country currency. Then, every time, proceeds to tell me how he went to this one particular currency exchange kiosk that always offers a good rate.
I went to college at a university that everyone from Dad’s alma mater dislikes as a matter of principle. So he didn’t want to wear any gear from my university, but still wanted to support me. His solution? He bought a shirt that happened to be in my school color…from a barbecue place. The shirt has a *ridiculous* cartoon drawing on it that’s basically every barbecue/southern stereotype in one (I think there’s an anthropomorphic pig in overalls and a straw hat and a tractor. Probably also hay bales). He wore this faithfully every time he visited me.
Oh, dads. Mine was very, very dadly, but has been gone since 2007. He died on a golf course, shortly after making a beautiful chip shot up onto a green, which might just be the platonic ideal of the dadly way to go.
So, what was so dadly about him? For starters, he told all of the dad jokes. Many of them over the years became whittled down to their punchlines for efficiency of referencing them. You don’t really need to recap more than “a good pig like that, you don’t eat all at once” to maximize your enjoyment, after all. He married the perfect partner in my mother, who never committed a punchline to memory in the entirety of her life thus far, so she always laughed at every re-re-re-re-told joke.
He was good with a dadly zinger, too. Once he and I were going out to dinner, just the two of us, and I was sitting in his car, fiddling with the door to the center console in his Honda Accord, which is labeled “PUSH” to show you where to apply pressure to open it. Dad got into the car and I said to him, “It says ‘push,’ so of course I had to try it.” Without missing a fraction of a beat, he replied, “I’m glad that, on the way over here, you didn’t pass by any gas stations advertising ‘clean restrooms.'”
Another favorite, when I would protest bedtime, was to ask me, “Do you know why you have to go to bed? Because the bed won’t come to you.” The typical bedtime signoff was “good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite, don’t bite any bedbugs, sweet dreams, see you in the morning, Princess.” (This was thirty-mumble years ago before Princessness became a marketing juggernaut.) I have used variations on these to good effect with my own kids.
I miss my dad. But at least I had one like him.
I miss my dad. But at least I had one like him.
Well, that sums it up for me, too. Crying now, but it’s okay.
My dad begins phone conversations with me with a singson-y “hello lovely DAU-ghter!” His emails begin with either that, “greetings, felicitations, l’chaim,” or “joy of my heart, crown of my youth, prop of my old age” (sometimes shortened to “joy, crown, prop”).
My dad is a very silly man. Whenever I point this out, he comes over, gazes deeply into my eyes, and intones, “merely a glimpse into your future” with a slightly unhinged look in his eyes.
When I was young my parents were graduate students working irregular hours and when my mom wasn’t available to make dinner, my dad used to cook what he called a big pot of noodles (大锅面). This involved taking all the leftovers in the refrigerator and boiling them with a box of spaghetti, soy sauce, and a big spoonful of peanut butter. At least once a year he’d leave it boiling on the stove, forget all about it, and burn it to a crisp and ruin the pot.
Dad always read my math textbooks at the beginning of the school year and criticized the ones that had too many photographs of smiling children playing games instead of derivations of equations. He loved my 7th grade pre-calculus text book so much he asked the school if he could keep. It’s still on our bookshelf in the living room today.
He pretty much only wears the free swag he gets from computer and engineering conventions or that we got from school events. Why waste money buying shirts and hats? My Dad’s style: D.A.R.E to resist drugs and violence shirt, an Intel baseball cap, a Linux windbreaker, pajama pants, and white mismatched athletic socks pulled up to mid-calf.
That is 100% my dad’s style too. Well, that and five (5) worn short-sleeve dress shirts from his sales job in the 80s.
Oh my gosh yes! I forgot about those! My dad used to wear those when he still worked. My favorite of his short-sleeved dress shirts had a light blue grid print that looked exactly like graph paper.
Reading these posts/comments about dads because it makes me feel like a sad 19th century London orphan looking through the window on a family’s Christmas dinner. My dad is a grade-A shithead who I haven’t seen or spoken to in years. Thank all the gods my mom is the most wonderful babe on the planet.
I know what you mean. It’s helping me to understand why people think it is sad that I don’t have a relationship with my father. I don’t want a relationship with *my* father, but I wouldn’t mind being adopted by these dadliest of dads.
When my mom took my sister and I (then aged 7 and 4) to live in another country for a few months for a temporary position, my dad sent us videotapes himself reading picture books in a raincoat for a series called “Reading Raincoat.”
My dad had a battered leather wallet that he refused to replace because it still fulfilled its function. He was robbed at gunpoint, and the robbers took out his cash, looked at the wallet, and tossed the wallet back to him.
He has a beard, and for my entire life, whenever anyone has pointed out that he has a bit of food stuck in his beard, he’ll look down and say, “I was saving that for later!” And whenever he answers my mom’s cell phone when I call, he puts on a falsetto and pretends to be her.
reading raincoat is so lovely, i feel a little verklempt at work right now.
My dad:
1) texts me the names of famous people who have just died, without other context
2) will still, to this day (he’s 52) put any conveniently-sized object on his head, put on an alien voice, and say “WE MEAN NO HARM TO YOUR PLANET”.
3) can quote the entirety of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (book) verbatim
4) collects books by people with the same surname as us, regardless of subject or literary merit
5) owns a total of 54 different replica shirts and sweaters from the 1999 Cricket World Cup
6) upon mention of any living British character actor, is 99% likely to say “Oh yes, I saw him/her in [Shakespeare] in 1988 …”
7) still calls me by the nickname he accidentally coined for me when I was two
8) ‘s favourite joke is “Why does Batman wear size 15 shoes? Because of his amazing feats!”
9) has collected me from outlying parts of London at outlandish hours of the night more times than I can count (hurray for tube failures)
One of my proudest moments, ever, was when I was a medium-sized teenager (16?) and had just read a pop-science genetics book and was very, very excited about it. Dad got me into a measured, thoughtful debate about nature vs. nurture – I was bubbling over with New Facts supporting inherited behaviour, so he played devil’s advocate and took an exclusively nurture-based position. He came up with a nurture-based explanation for every example of maybe-inherited animal behaviour I could think of, and then I FINALLY stumped him by saying “Well, what about cuckoos?” He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said “I’ll have to think about that one.”
It was the first time I’d managed to out-argue him and it still warms the cockles of my heart years later.
My dad is the best.
My dad used to tell a lot of off-colour jokes that I would never understand. When I asked them what he meant he invariably told me “I’ll tell you when you’re 21”. And so I collected many many memories of him telling me things I was supposed to learn when I was 21. When I turned 21 I asked him to explain himself and he couldn’t remember even one of the jokes.
We speak 2 languages at home: English and Afrikaans. Another joke he makes every time I talk to him is “Don’t worry, alles sal rectum” which rhymes with “alles sal reg gaan” meaning everything will turn out well. But he can’t help but put in a rectum joke in his Afrikaans sentence at every opportunity.
When I was… 15? 16? I rented Carrie from Blockbuster (RIP) and my dad and I were watching it in the living room. My habit in those days of carpeted living rooms was to lie on my stomach and prop my chin in my hands, so my legs were the closest part of me to the couch. My dad was sitting on the couch, like an adult.
My dad had seen Carrie before. I had not.
SPOILERS
At the end, when Sue is laying flowers on Carrie’s burned-out lot, and Carrie’s hand shoots out and grabs her wrist, my dad – at that same instant – reached down and grabbed my ankle. I went from flat on my stomach to 3 feet in the air in about 0.0005 of a second, and RAN out of the house and screamed at him from the front yard for like 5 minutes about how he was a terrible parent.
Still a fond memory.
OH man, brilliant. Good job dad.
My dad, while talking about a female colleague he deeply admires:
“I mean, you do NOT mess with her. She’s got brass balls—”
Interrupts himself, shakes his head, then says, with complete sincerity and not a hint of mockery:
“I’m sorry. That was offensive. Brass… fallopian tubes. She’s got gigantic brass fallopian tubes. You just do not pull off a coup that successful without huge brass fallopes.”
Why fallopian tubes and not, I don’t know, ovaries? Because dads.
Once he sent me a text message that included a photo of a very large rattle snake he had just murdered. It was arranged next to one of his tennis racquets for scale.
My dad is a blue-collar, jeans and primary color t-shirts type of guy. His wardrobe for semi-formal occasions is fairly limited. One time we were off to some event, like a graduation or something, and he came down stairs wearing what appeared to be a neon pink polo. I commented, “nice pink shirt, Dad”. To which he responded, “it’s PEACH.” His other “nice shirt” of choice is a bright turquoise polo…
My Dad has the funniest expressions. If he farts, he’ll pause a minute and then be all “Hmmm, somebody’s treading on toads.” If I ask him if he wants something – a bagel, a napkin, an asprin – he’ll say “Nah, I’m trying to give them up.” Every time we get in the car, he starts singing “On The Road Again”. <3
One last thing: My son is 8 1/2 months old. I’m going to start dry-aging a salami in the basement this weekend.
My dad has called me Ratchethead since my infancy because my snoring sounds like the noise a rachet makes (thank you long-suffering husband); definitely the most Dad thing about our relationship.
my dad is a 70-year-old Australian prodigy violinist with Asperger’s who once tried to fix something on the roof and fell off the house because he didn’t realize our roof was slanted. Not typical “dad” material. He cannot so much as turn on a computer or send a text, so unfortunately I miss out on any hilarious “dad attempting to use technology” stories (though he did once pay me $100 to type and print something for him).
However, he does share the One True Dad Trait: a love of bad puns. He once told me that the challah he bought for Shabbat that week wasn’t very good, but he wasn’t going to return it because “I ain’t no challah back girl.” (I have no idea where a man who only reads The New Yorker and chess magazines even heard that phrase.) Another time, he mused “I don’t know how the medical industry will survive now that Barnes and Noble is the only major chain bookstore. I mean, can you imagine doctors without Borders?”
I’m simultaneously envious of your having such wonderful dads, and heartened that there are so many out there!
My dad, who is not exactly expressive, once struggled to tell me how proud of me he was. He came up with this gem: “If I was you, I’d go out and take a shit in the middle of the road!” Yes, I too was baffled, and I had to prod him to explain what he meant. “You know, you did good, and no one can stop you! You do what you want!” Okay, dad. Okay.
My brother was on the receiving end of this one: “I paid for your college and you don’t fucking believe in goddamn Jesus?” We still treasure that memory.
I loved reading the dad stories last night! My dad’s favorite thing is to announce himself in various ways either in person or on the phone. Sometimes when he comes home after being gone for more than an hour or two, he likes to shout out “I’m back from the Peloponnesian War!” He also likes to answer the phone by saying, “City Morgue: You stab em, we slab em!”
Another one: Spanish is his first language, and one of his faaaavorite dad-things to do when his Spanish-speaking friends call him is to answer the phone by letting them know they’ve reached “El Guapo!” He also signs all his text messages “Love, Dad” because he thinks they should end formally like letters do. Dads.
When I got the grades I needed to go to university, he immediately went to Asda (his favourite place, or it was until the Lidl opened near us) and bought me a can opener. I was really touched!
Oh my darling father. Nicknamed “Wayne Brady” by my friends, just a man who loves boxed wine and pastel colored shorts.
My favorite story of my father is when he told me about the time he went to a Barry Manilow concert (I know) alone (I KNOW) when he was a young man, and got picked up by a gay man.
My sweet father, telling me this story- totally incredulous. “And you know what he wanted to do when we got back to his place?”
“Sleep with you?”
“….how did you know?”
“Dad.You were at Barry Manilow concert. Alone.”
“He has a lovely voice!”**
**Also what he says when I catch him listening to Jesse McCartney’s “Beautiful Soul,” RENT’s “Seasons of Love” and anything on the NSYNC Christmas Album.
OH, that reminds me of another dad-thing my dad did.
There was an article in the Onion about 15 years ago called “Why Can’t I Sell Any Of These Fucking Bibles?” It was from the POV of a foul-mouthed, door-to-door bible salesman. My dad cut out this article and carried it around in his wallet, showing it to anyone he thought would enjoy it, cracking up each time. The first time he read it, he laughed so hard there were tears streaming down his face.
Every Thanksgiving, Dad offered me turkey even though I’d given up meat 5 or 10 or 20 years earlier.
Aw, Dads!
My Dad pretends to not be enthusiastic about things, or to not like things, but he secretly does. He used to grumble about our old dog, but sometimes I would catch him having conversations with the dog when he thought no-one could hear him. My Mum reports that he also does the same thing with his chickens, stands in the backyard and talks to them (and also giving them obscure names based on their personality traits).
He grumbled about helping me put up Christmas lights when I still lived at home, and pretended it was so inconvenient. I moved out the next year, and when I visited at Christmas time, I discovered he had bought ALL the Christmas lights, and had turned the front yard into a Christmas light extravaganza! He will ask everyone every year if they like his Christmas lights!
He also taught me to drive a manual car (only a few years ago, I was about 25 and had my licence for years, but only on autos) and kindly reassured me when I had a sobbing breakdown about not being able to do it, drove me back home, and gave me a gin and tonic to help me get over it!
Your comment about the dog reminded me of the way my dad would always talk about “that damn cat” and then pet her continuously for hours as soon as she jumped in his lap.
My dad did the graphs thing too! He would also do like improvised “science experiments” with water and oil or toothpicks or whatever. I guess I didn’t absorb the lessons too well, but that wasn’t for his lack of trying!
I thought *my* dad made that up! He always called it that when he took some of my popcorn. xD
My dad and I had a ritual of watching a cable reality crime show about homicide detectives. He will txt me with no context when there is a development in one of the police officers’ careers or lives on the show: “Sgt. Mason got promoted to Lieutenant.”
Blames his farts on “barking spiders.”
On the RSVP cards to our wedding, we asked guests to list their favorite dancing song. My dad wrote the following, verbatim:
Wild Horses (Stones)
Locomotive Breath (Tull)
Magic Carpet Ride (Steppenwolf)
For Crying Out Loud
All Revved Up (Meat Loaf) [He put a large bracket around those two, so I would remember that they were by the same artist.]
Money For Nothing (Dire Straits)
Desperadoes [sic] Under the Eaves (Zevon)
Accidentally Like A Martyr (Zevon) [no brackets here; inconsistent]
Tangerine (Led Zep)
They were all written in kind of a bubble, and my mom wrote “We Are Family!” in the middle.
When his mother / my grandmother was diagnosed with dementia, my dad gave copies of a book about caring for someone with dementia to every member of our family – with relevant paragraphs highlighted with pink and yellow highlighter pens.
MY HEART HURTS
That’s dedication!
Late to the party, but:
I learned to polka when I was 10. There was a polka CD playing (Dad moment #1), and I was drying dishes. Dad just grabbed me and started dancing. To continue this tradition, I did this to a new acquaintance at my brother’s wedding.
When I was 8, I was in the doctor’s office, waiting to get a throat culture to see if I had strep. To keep my mind off the pain, Dad told me to prove that any number multiplied by 2 was an even number. He then explained to me what a proof by example was, and why it was unacceptable. Then I learned about variables.
And then the existence proof, and the construction, and … SO MANY PROOFS. The fun never needs to end.
Favorite of all possible daughters.
On the day my dad dropped me off at college for the first time, he went looking all over the area to find a hardware store then put together a toolkit for me.
My dad is engaged in a decade-long battle with squirrels in the backyard. They keep eating from the birdfeeder and he keeps trying to outwit them. It has involved videotaping the squirrels, building elaborate tunnel-and-pole contraptions, and LOTS of window-staring, muttering, and graph paper machinations.
I’m the eldest, and whenever my dad wants to ask me for a favor, he promises that if I do it, “I’ll name my first-born child after you!”
When watching the musical Les Mis, my dad starts crying when the Bishop of Digne gives Valjean the candlesticks (ie five minutes into the show, while some late-comers are still finding their seats). Not at the death of Fantine, or Eponine, or Gavroche. At the silver candlesticks. EVERY TIME.
My dad has the extremely Dadly ability to hang level pictures by working some sort of magic with a hammer. I don’t know how it works, even though he keeps teaching me.
When I was in college, he used to send me gigantic boxes of the Boscoff cookies they serve on Delta. This was amazing.
Because he is a Fancy Dad, when we go out for nice dinners, he always judges the scotch list and goes through all the options he isn’t drinking because he already has a bottle at home. But, y’know, he still has to go through the list and evaluate it.
And Santa still comes on Christmas, even though I’m in my 30s, but I get Vitamin D, Pringles and Junior mints.
I have to add to this thread because my father, aka Papa Z, is one of the greats!
My father LOVES wild turkeys more than any other animal on this planet. Why you may ask?! Well he has explained me that turkeys spend 9 months of the years hanging out with the “boys” and then 3 months “banging” babes(aka female turkeys). It’s great he explains, you can play cards with the guys all year then still get your action on a side. In fact, one of the deciding factors of his last move was that there was turkeys in the backyard. He loves feeding the turkeys and frequently puts out decoys just to call the males out of the forest next to our house. He has even taught me how to call a turkey(certainly a CV worthy skill). Anyhow this being stated, he still enjoys hunting them and always knows 3 months in advance when the 1 week of turkey season will be. After getting his annual turkey de-feathered he always makes sure to store at least one turkey foot in our freezer at all times. He thoroughly enjoys taking it out on various occasions, to lightly tap our shoulders or massage our head when we aren’t paying attention. Ahhh Papa Z you’re a legend.
When my sisters and I first started working, my dad would come to our places of employment and take pictures of us in our full work regalia. Somewhere we have a picture of my sister grumpily standing behind a Dairy Queen counter, pointedly ignoring my father.
When his Halley’s Comet wallet finally fell apart after roughly 20 years of use, my dad started keeping his money – coins and all – in a ziplock freezer bag.
Whenever anyone says, “I’m hungry!” his reply is “Hi Hungry, I’m Papa!” Now I do this to my kids and my daughter can’t stand it. These comments have given me a lot of ideas for furthering my growth into fatherhood.
Once, when I was about 16, I had a horrible job washing dishes at a local restaurant. The conditions were terrible and my boss was a tyrant, and one night the dishwasher malfunctioned, and I was made to stay several hours past my shift, alone, meticulously working through the mountain of dishes by hand. I called my parents, who were out at a fancy party, to say I wouldn’t be home until late and not to worry. I’d been working for ten hours by then and had no hopes of getting off anytime soon, and I was sad and exhausted and probably sounded like it on the phone. Fifteen minutes later, my Dad knocked on the door to the kitchen where I was working. He’d left the party right after I’d hung up and was still in his nice black suit. He gave me a hug and, ignoring my protests, threw on an apron and got to work beside me. We worked like that for maybe an hour, just the two of us in the huge, empty kitchen, my dad ruining his suit and keeping up a stream of humming and bad jokes that soon had me laughing. He made an evening that started out horrible turn out lovely, and I’ll always remember it as one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me. 🙂
This is a really great story.
In early 80’s I was 6-7 year old, my dad took me to watch the IV episode of Star Wars. He fall asleep shortly after the opening sequence, I thought there is something seriously wrong with him. It took me more that 30 years to do more a less the same.
My dad was hospitalized after some major surgery, and I came back home from Chicago (a 6 hour drive) to be there. He was recovering, so I went home, only for him to take a turn during the night and be put on a short-term ventilator. So I turned around the next day and went back. Three or four days later, I happened to be the family member at the hospital when they took him off the ventilator.
The very first words out of his mouth in however many days? “Did you really drive all the way to Chicago and back?” SO DAD.
In that same visit, he was extremely high on pain medication. At one point he was clearly feeling better, because he started trying to unhook IV lines and catheters. When I asked him what he was doing he said “I’m getting out of here! I don’t know WHY you aren’t helping me!” I managed not to laugh then, but on the phone with my husband that night I died laughing.
Okay, this one is late, but I just thought of it last night.
My parents, when they were a young married couple, bought a new car. It was a terrible car and they were broke and it got repossessed. After that, they developed a stern, strong stance against buying new cars. Over the years, this developed into a major philosophy of car ownership. The two central tenets of this, according to my father, are as follows:
1. “A car should go a 250,000 miles. That’s a lunar unit,” he says in his math teacher voice. And then he adds, even though we’ve had this conversation many times over the years, “That’s the distance from the earth to the moon.”
2. “Don’t ever talk about money in front of the car.” The rationale is that if the car knows you have money, it will decide to break down immediately so you have to spend the money on it. This rule, well, yeah, I actually do try to follow. Because one time, I kid you not, I was in my car on the phone with my dad, telling him I’d just gotten my student loan money and was going to the bank to deposit it. The car died as I pulled into the bank parking lot. Dad didn’t say, “I told you so,” but it kind of hung in the air.
Fortunately, I had my Dad-Christmas-gifted AAA to get a tow to a repair shop.
Stories about my dad’s exploits are so legendary that whenever I see my high school friends they always ask me if if I have any new dad stories to tell.
Essentially since my dad is absolutely impervious to embarrassment, so he always likes to do things in the most logical and practical way possible regardless of social consequences.
For Example: When I was young that we used to have a big yard, so my dad got a riding mower so he could mow the lawn more efficiency. However, he worked long hours so he was only able to mow the lawn at night. Also, when one is doing yard work it’s customary to wear your old clothes that you don’t mind getting dirty. But my dad used to be whatever the male equivalent of a debutante is. So his old clothes are a whole tuxedo with tails! So picture a guy on a riding lawn lawnmower, at night, in a full tuxedo.. But whenever he’s asked why he would do such a crazy thing my dad just says. “Well it seems perfectly logical to me!” DADS!
Honestly, I could go on and on telling dad stories. But it will just add that to this day the only thing my dad really wants for Christmas is: batteries, gym socks, and VHS tapes!
My dad is in a dad band with several other dads; they all have white-collar jobs and mustaches* and get together every once in a while to play Led Zeppelin and Cream songs.
My dad also has dad fandoms. He moderates a guitar posting board and has a yearly meetup at the PRS guitar factory.
My dad owns a custom bobblehead that looks like him.
The last time I needed an Allen wrench, my dad gave me a little Allen wrench swiss army knife thing with a bunch of different-sized wrenches in it, and told me to keep it because he had plenty of extra ones.
My dad recently showed me a bunch of photos he took at concerts as a teenager. I now know two things:
1. Once upon a time, my dad was cooler than me.
2. Bruce Springsteen was really, really attractive in the 1970s.
*I cannot verify that every single member of my dad’s dad band has a mustache, but he certainly does.
I didn’t realize the full extent to which my Dad is a Dad until I tried to meet up with him at a Bruce Springsteen concert. VERITABLE SEA OF DADS. Like trying to find Waldo in one of the ones where everyone in the picture kind of looks like Waldo.
More Dad Ross stories! My dad has to do a lot of international travel for his job. Every time he travels he brings home tons of tchotchkes from whatever country he was visiting as presents. They are mostly junk, and he never buys them specifically with someone in mind, he just considers it his sacred duty to get presents for his extended family, entire office, and the neighbors whenever he goes on a trip. He is a junk peddlers dream. When he gets home he will present these gifts to us with much ceremony. If there are things that we don’t want (this means most of the things!) He will take them to his “present closet” to give to someone else at a later date. However, he NEVER remembers who he is given the gifts to previously, so we frequently receive the same dad gifts multiple times. After the 3rd time my mother received a truly ugly necklace we have made him add little notes to gifts detailing who he cannot give them to. It does not matter if no one in the world wants one of his gifts he will never throw it out. DADS!
Dad Ross loves Joan Baez, so one year for Father’s Day my sister and I sucked it up and took him to a Joan Baez concert. He got to the concert parking garage before us and was very concerned that we wouldn’t get a space, so he parked his car next to an empty space and then proceeded to stand in the space to hold it for us. However, he was still in his suit from work, and of course he couldn’t wear a suit to a Joan Baez concert! So when there didn’t seem to be any other cars looking to steal the space he was guarding for us he jumped in the car to quickly change his clothes. However, just as he was changing his pants, a car came and tried to pull into the space so he jumped out of his car wearing only tighty whities frantically waving his arms. Him and the driver of the car proceeded to get into a screaming argument – and this is the scene that greeted my sister and I when we finally arrived. The only comment my dad had about the incident was: “I can’t believe someone would be so horrible at a Joan Baez concert. It’s supposed to be about peace and love!” The kicker is that there was totally other parking left in the garage.
My dad:
– Has devised routes to all his normal driving destinations (grocery store, etc) that involve minimal left turns because they are less efficient than right turns.
– Came up with a system so my family knows who has read what section of the newspaper. He tears the upper right corner (he is right-handed), my mom tears the upper left corner (my mom is left-handed), and I (used to, before I moved) tear the middle. Once everything is torn, it can be recycled.
– Was trying to avoid fattening foods, so for a while brought a tub of plain fat-free yogurt to Mexican restaurants to substitute for sour cream.
– Is now retired and spends time editing Wikipedia articles.
– Has a schedule of walks with friends. His walking outfit is usually khaki shorts, crew socks pulled up all the way, white tennis shoes, M.R. Ducks tshirt, and baseball cap. His post-walk routine is to sit in his recliner and drink a beer.
This is amazing. The yogurt bit especially.
My dad also hates left turns. I remember it being a frequent topic of conversation.
My dad subscribes to the McDonald Observatory’s “sky tips” newsletter (already a pretty dad thing to do) and regularly forwards the newsletter to me with a quick note or two of his own describing highlights to look out for.
When I was little, we used to mess around with telescopes and drive out into the desert to watch all kinds of astronomical events – he’ll still text me to remind me when the various showers come around and if there’s a good eclipse coming up.
I love my dad.
– Scandalized me at age 6 when I said I wanted to be a ghost for Halloween and that I really needed a sheet, and he told me that the bathroom was down the hall.
– Frequently lost control of his truck only to regain it in the parking lot of the ice cream parlor.
– Put the old baby seat he used on his bike on my bike, waited until my mom left the house, and told me to go ride to the grocery for a gallon of milk and a giant candy bar for each of us, and that I could keep the change if I didn’t tell on him. I told my (overprotective) mom two years ago and she is still mad about this.
– Built a waterworks out of two-by-fours and plastic piping to get water out of a natural spring on the family farm. Nobody uses it. He just wanted to see if he could do it.
– Carved a banjo neck to look like his self portrait, with long hair. It adds about seven pounds to the banjo’s weight.
– Immediately after retiring from 38 years with a federal agency, grew a ponytail and a Van Dyke beard.
– When my mom was crying and telling me to be careful when they dropped me off at college, he cackled and told me to give them hell and pulled out of the parking lot.
– When my mom was voicing concern about me going to meet axe murderers from the internet my sophomore year of college, he said that when he was my age he was in the Marines in Vietnam and I was capable of doing anything I wanted at that age.
– Came out to Denver to move me to Mississippi for graduate school. His first demand was to go to a medical marijuana dispensary, “just to see.”
– When my first apartment in NC for round two of graduate school was overrun with roaches and I had a nervous breakdown, he (and my mom!) came up to fix my life, which involved another pest-free apartment. He inspected every inch of it with a flashlight, and once I’d signed the lease, he went straight to the hardware store to get caulk, a metal ring to put around the pipes under the sinks, and outlet covers (like for toddler-proofing). I didn’t ask him to do it. We’re not a family that talks about mental illness. He already told me that he thought the apartment would be fine, but he wanted me to have visual evidence that it was safe and nothing would get through, and he told me that if I saw anything, I should call him and he’d drive up (seven hours) to deal with it immediately.
This is coming late, but I didn’t think my dad was such a Dad until now!
– He used to sing songs from musicals as he drove me and my friends to school (he favoured My Fair Lady), which I obviously found excruciating at the time.
– Any time I move anywhere, he buys me a new flashlight. He himself has the world’s largest and brightest flashlight, and also once bought some kind of …spotlight? I don’t know why. He kept it in the basement. But now that I think about it, he once spent hours one night during the only summer we ever rented a cottage, staging and taking fake UFO photos. The spotlight may have been used in that project.
– He bought me a really fancy protractor and compass for my tenth birthday. This seemed particularly cruel at the time, not only because all I wanted was t-shirts from Gap Kids, but because I was failing math. In retrospect maybe it was supposed to be some kind of encouragement.
– At least once a week he’ll send me an email asking what I’m eating (at that moment? generally? I don’t know).
My boyfriend has a really shitty dad, but I have the feeling he’s going to be the Daddest of Dads when the time comes. He’s already such a weirdo.
Over the years I have given my father two of those sound-enhanced Hallmark cards. One plays Burl Ives’ “Holly Jolly Christmas” and the other says on the front, “Another birthday? Surely you can’t be serious!” and then plays the line from “Airplane!” – “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.” At some point when the battery died in one of them, my dad tore apart another of those cards, cannibalized the battery and replaced the dead one so the card would still work. (The card he sacrificed had been given to my mother by her brother, but she hates musical cards, so she didn’t mind its loss. What she did mind was the continued existence of the Burl Ives card.)
Also, my dad will never miss a chance to quote from either “The Jerk” or “Christmas Vacation”: “That’s what you call an RV, Clark.”
And he hates watching movies in widescreen and will always choose pan and scan if available “because it fills up the whole screen.”
More on my dad: He receives a Target gift card every December as a year-end bonus from his workplace and then struggles to spend it because “Target doesn’t have anything I need.” Two years ago he ended up using it on new floor mats for my mom’s car, just to get rid of it. I think he’s still carrying around last year’s.
He replaced the hubcaps on his riding mower. He sent me pictures of the new ones (which he insists on calling “blades”).
He’s a recent widower learning how to manage finances and paperwork on his own for the first time, and he regularly Facetimes me to show me the letters and statements he receives in the mail so I can tell him what to do about them.
And he has taken a picture of every rental car he’s ever had, along with other cars that have just happened to be in his driveway (such as the old Corvette driven by a friend of mine from high school). I recently had to rent a car to drive the rest of the way to his house after my flight was canceled, and the look on his face was worth every penny I spent to show up in a brand-new Dodge Charger.
And, like many other commenters’ cads, he signs all his texts “Love Dad”. He’s only learned to text in the months since my mom died and he still has never sent an email, so every time I see that sign-off it makes me smile.
I am 29. I’ve had a number of boyfriends over the years. Dad knows they’ve spent the night and my place and vice-versa. I think he still likes to think that I’m a virgin because I haven’t been married yet.
When I was a child, my dad spotted the (UK/Canada) cover of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and correctly identified the car as a Ford Anglia. I’m 90% sure he has watched all the movies on the off-chance that the Anglia shows up.
I live across the country, and he visited for a few weeks earlier this year. He took it upon himself to make all the improvements to my apartment that the super hadn’t gotten around to, including drafting designs for wall-mounted blind brackets which he would make at home and then mail to me, 3000 kilometers away.
Grandfathers are dads too: my grandfather painstakingly kept a record of every videotape and later, DVD, he owned through a complex labelling system that involved hand-written and taped-on numbers, and (the best part) a notebook recording the name and number of each movie. In order to borrow a movie, you had to write down its name and number in the notebook, like a library card. When my grandfather died and his DVD collection split up, I made sure to keep the notebook.
My dad purposely shouts "touchdown!" at baseball games and "home run!" at football games.
He brings plastic bags to movies; big ones to put your coat in so it doesn't get dirty if it touches the floor (?) and a smaller one that he transfers the popcorn into so your hands don't get greasy from holding the popcorn bag.
Oh, man! I’m locked on Twitter and think I missed this thread but wanted to input my own Dad-ism.
He stored the “Rugrats in Paris” soundtrack in the car to listen to “WHO LET THE DOGS OUT” on repeat every car ride. He would usually sing along (and by that I mean shout along).
He is also a former biker who, once I started dating, would remind me that he “knew a few guys in the Hell’s Angels” back in the days. I have seen one picture of these “days” where he has a ZZ Top beard and leather vest, and it is glorious.
My dad relays all directions in very precise units in reference to fast food restaurants and hardware stores. For example “You’re going to turn left about 1/4 miles after the Dunkin’ Donuts. Not the Dunkin’ Donuts before the Home Depot, the one after.”
Also my Dad-in-Law (RIP) used to buy all his clothing at Costco, or as we would call it “The Ugly Shirt-Club for Men.”
When I was in college, I did a semester in Australia. It was not only my first time spending more than a week in another country, it was my first time going away for school because I was a commuter student in college. My parents drove me to the airport for the multi-connection flight (Philly to LA, LA to Australia) and since this was post 9/11 they couldn't accompany me past security. My mom still talks about how my dad made the 2 of them sit on these rocking chairs just outside security until my plane had taken off because what if I'd changed my mind at the last minute and went back into the airport but they weren't there?! And he knew when my plane took off despite a minor delay because every 10 minutes he'd ask the ticket counter for updates (my mom was convinced they'd be arrested by the TSA). After they got home, he was glued to the computer to track my flight online. 24+ hours later or something, I'm in Australia, checking into the Melbourne hotel with the rest of my orientation group and we're probably 3 hours behind schedule by then. When the front desk staff gave me my room key, they had a message waiting: your dad called. Please call him back to let him know when you've arrived.
I was mortified at the time (but the staff was so nice about it) but now I'm like, "oh, silly Daddy."
He also wants the choir to play "Rains of Castamere" at my sister's very Catholic wedding Mass in December when she walks down the aisle.
When I got my first apartment several years ago, which was only about 30 minutes or less from my parents' house, he insisted on mapping out like, 5 different routes to get between the 2 locations. And he still worries about me driving on freeways and interstates even though I've been driving for nearly 16 years now.
When my family would go out to the country for weekend trips, my dad would wake us all up at 6:00 am to go on hikes. He would then proceed to lead us up a hill to any spot that had a good view of a train track. We were then made to sit down and told to wait so he could watch the train go by.
On the way back, he would tell us where the track led on either side, and what destinations you could go to if you took the train and then a connecting one from one of the stations it passed.
He also claims to have “an inbuilt compass” in his brain.
The entire genre of fantasy is lost on him, because “that could never happen” (That’s the POINT, DAD) but he looooooves sci fi. His favorite book is The Andromeda Strain. Also, he has watched every wold war 2 movie ever made at least 8 times.
Dads! Mine is an old musician and has a song for everything. It usually goes like: banal activity + puns of an old R&B song = “I’m so tiiiiiiirrrrrrrred of makin’ coffee, I’m so tiiiiiirrrrrred of makin eggs, won’t you help me, daughter, as soon as you caaaaaaaannnnnn”. I do this about 4 times a day.
Dads! Mine is an old musician and has a song for everything. It usually goes like: banal activity + puns of an old R&B song = "I'm so tiiiiiiirrrrrrrred of makin' coffee, I'm so tiiiiiirrrrrred of makin eggs, won't you help me, daughter, as soon as you caaaaaaaannnnnn". I do this about 4 times a day.
When I was in primary school, I was given the task of writing a short essay on why bedtime was unfair. My dad took it upon himself to write a side of A4 about why children needed to go to bed early so they could sweep chimneys and shovel coal in the mornings. He sent it in to my teacher and it was displayed on the wall with the rest of the class’s responses for some time.
Instead of “and so forth” or “and that kind of thing,” my dad says “and stuff on it.” He says it very fast, and very frequently — once every other sentence or so. “It was a great movie, in terms of the scenery and the camera-work andstuffonit, and the acting was just great, very sincere and heartfelt andstuffonit . . .”
i saw this and had to come back and post it. (this is not my dad, i saw this on tumblr.)