Topic: Father

Author: Chris Dunn

“Oh, yeah? Well… My dad can beat up your dad!” This taunt got thrown around a lot when I was a child, rarely at me, of course, since my father taught me to work hard to avoid the situations where such taunts would arise (i.e. Fights). Instead, I was typically on the sidelines when two boys would square off in disagreement and allow things to escalate to sharing each other’s breath in close proximity along with the traditional pre-fight exchange of threats. There wasn’t always a fight in the offing, sometimes it was just simple macho posturing for status, but either way I was always afforded time to think on the unspoken question. “Could my dad beat up theirs?”

My father was strong. I remember him rushing me, cradled in his powerful arms, to the emergency room. Despite my added weight, he leapt in a single bound up the four foot loading dock rather than waste the time scaling the steps. His thunderous command cut through the tangled, ER bureaucracy. We didn’t wait in line, sitting for hours with the bloodied and bandaged in the waiting room. We were ushered straight to x-ray and in short order found ourselves sitting an exam room as a bored-looking doctor pointed to the gray image of my skeleton with an obvious foreign object hovering within the nest of bones. “Yeah, it’s a penny.” The doctor was obviously unimpressed.

And he was certainly crafty. Our townhouse on Bising Avenue was frequent host to bearded college men, some his students, some his fellow professors, some just friends. The would hover over their armies as they stroked their beards, adjusted their spectacles, and pondered furiously for hours. I tried to watch and learn from the masters as they shuffled their horses and bishops in intricate, slanting attacks and defenses, but the game moved at such a ponderous pace to the eyes of an eight year old. Win or lose, his mastery of the game’s rules and the procession of obviously learned men who had journeyed to our backwater berg just sto challenge the master, proved his station as one of the greatest. It would be nearly a decade before I won my first game against him. It is still one of my happiest days.

And smart? Puh-lease! The man’s brain is a vault of knowledge. I’ve seen him – albeit, at the oddest of times - pull from it reams of poetry and prose. Don’t you dare mention a crow around him, unless you’ve got time to hear all 13 different ways of looking at it. For years I assumed he knew Shakespeare personally and had helped him write most of the plays. We had a rule in our house, parents weren’t allowed to answer Jeopardy questions, until the kids gave up, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get an answer in edgewise. “Why don’t you go on this show?” we would plead. He unraveled the mysteries of poetry, converting it from a tangled web of sing-songy lines into heart-felt sentences arranged in meter. He was the one who taught me that Shakespeare was more a bawdy, joke-smith than a lofty, unreachable master whose reputation obscured understanding. I owe my English degree to him, in more ways than one.

But this is a fight... Does he have the fire and fury inside him to take down his fellow man? Surely, I’ve seen him red with rage at the injustices this world can heap upon people. Many time of I’ve heard him speak with the harshest invective against those whose would exploit their others for their own gain. I’ve seen him tear apart a chair with his bare hands and punch a hole in the dining room wall, but never have I seen him strike another person.

In truth, he often seems too gentle for this world, and must take pills to numb the many pains it can cause. He’ll give you the shirt off his back and spend hours – much to my mother’s chagrin – talking to the witness of jehovah - you know, since they came all the way out. He is the founder of the only faith whose tenets I believe in total. Put simply: No hitting.

So can he beat up your dad? If we’re talking philosophically, it’s likely no contest. And if we’re not talking philosophically, I really don’t care.