Happy Father's Day

Dad, Happy Father’s Day! Thanks for the lessons, intended and otherwise. Sometimes I learned best from the “otherwise”. ;P

Since my dad is gone, I took my two older brothers out to dinner Saturday night. My dad taught me a lot, some of it useful, some obscure and some…bizarre. He taught me:

--it’s important to stand up for others and what’s right
--how to tighten a loose wood screw by placing a small, rolled up wad of paper in the hole
--how to walk quietly (especially important when he was sleeping)
--how to swim quietly (in case I ever needed to take out an enemy machine gun nest by swimming across a river and circling behind it—also, see “walk quietly”)
--don’t grab a spark plug wire while a car is running (it could kill you)
--in the woods, rabbits run in half-circles when making their escape
--how to protect yourself from a large, attacking dog

That last one startled my wife when I shared the story. When I was around 12, there was a nasty German Shepard terrorizing the neighborhood. If you faced him, you were fine. But if your back was turned, you were in trouble. Many nights I heard him run up behind me in the dark as I walked home from helping my grandmother close her store. I learned the best way make him back off was to move aggressively towards him and throw rocks. I think I even growled a time or two (to hide my fear). One night my older brother and I waited on our back porch for our mom’s ceramics class (at a neighbor’s house) to end so we could walk her home. He had a baseball bat. My dad asked what we were doing and then proceeded to tell us that using a bat on the dog would be wrong—the dog would be too quick! He shared a better way for us to protect ourselves. His advice was to crouch a little, so the dog would go for our throats (I kid you not). Then when the dog jumped at you, you were supposed to jam your forearm deeply into his mouth (so he couldn’t get a good bite); bring your other arm up behind his neck, and then **snap**.

We got our mom home safely that night—and thankfully I have no idea if my dad’s advice would work or not. He lost me at, “get him to go for your throat.” LOL! Maybe I'm a bad father, but when I imagined myself passing on that advice to my kids, I just laughed and laughed. I haven't made them eat liver either. ;P

Now there were many, many, many other things (mostly good) that I learned from my dad and I’m almost positive that was a strangest. But only almost positive. What’s the weirdest thing you learned from a parent???