Don't Be an Idiot

When I graduated college and decided to spend a year wandering around Europe, my father drove me to the airport. At a stoplight, he handed me a box of fifty condoms.

“Be safe,” he said.

I looked at the box. It had been ripped open and was missing a few. I pointed to the torn opening at the top of the box.

“Dad…”

“Ach,” he said. “They’re expensive.”

My father was a pragmatist. He showed love by preparing me for a world that wouldn’t.

One morning when I was around ten years old, he looked up from the book he was reading and, apropos of nothing, said, “If you’re ever stuck behind enemy lines, find a brothel. They’ll hide you.” Then he went back to his book. I had no idea what a brothel was, so I looked it up and wondered what he knew about my future.

My friends’ fathers taught them how to throw a fastball. Mine offered a different curriculum. He told me not to inhale cigars, and never to put more than one ice cube in a Scotch. He also said you were too drunk to drive if you couldn’t recite the quadratic formula from memory, which I couldn’t do sober. Also, I was twelve.

He also told me I shouldn’t expect his help once I turned eighteen. “I don’t own you,” he said. “I’m renting.”

He was kidding. He meant it in the most loving way possible. He was saying: Be prepared. Soon enough you’ll need to stand on your own.

My dad didn’t quite know what to do with children, having never really been a child himself. I have a photo of him from Germany when he was six, holding a Schultüte, the giant paper cone filled with treats children receive on their first day of school. My father looked annoyed, like the whole thing was beneath him.

A few years after that photo was taken, his father was arrested and forced to sell his dry goods store for pennies on the dollar. They barely made it out of Germany after that. Most of their relatives who stayed behind were killed in one camp or another. Like so many immigrants, they arrived broke and broken.

So, with no childhood to draw from, my father didn’t know how to be a fun dad. He believed in hard truths. He took me to see a Harlem Globetrotters game for my birthday once. When I worried the Washington Generals were catching up, he scowled, “Don’t be an idiot. It’s fixed.”

As I shook his hand goodbye at the airport, he said, “Your mother’s worried you’ll be reckless over there.”

“Are you?” I asked.

“Nah, she just wanted me to tell you that. But don’t be an idiot.”

My mom wrote me loads of letters while I was abroad, often leaving a little space for my dad to add something. On one, commenting on my upcoming boat trip to Greece, he wrote: “Watch for shoals and the rapids as you sail along the Mediterranean basin.” He was quoting the Odyssey, which he somehow assumed I had read.

He wrote on another that he was jealous of my adventure. I read that line over and over. It felt like pride.

When I had children of my own, he didn’t become one of those swooning grandparents. He once saw me carrying my nine-month-old son Adam in a chest sling and said, “Put him down already. He’s not a baby.”

I raised my kids differently. Tickle fights on the living room floor. Football and baseball games. Dad jokes at the dinner table.

But kids don’t always want what their parents want. I was wrestling with Adam on the floor of a shopping mall once when he was seven or eight, rolling around outside Macy’s while my wife shopped. I had him pinned and was tickling him while he tried to twist free. I thought he was having fun, but he looked up at me and said, “I don’t think I’ll be as playful as you when I’m a dad.”

I froze, crouched on the mall floor. Kids have a way of telling you who you are and who they aren’t when you’re not expecting it.

Years later, weeks before he died, my father talked only about whatever was right in front of him. My bright shirt. His painful dentures. How cold he was. He was always cold now.

He told my older brother Steve he knew he would die soon. Steve asked how he’d like to be remembered.

“Just forget about me as soon as possible,” he said.

The night my father died, I followed some of his advice: I poured a Scotch with one ice cube and smoked a cigar without inhaling.

But I also disobeyed him and started this essay.

Don’t be an idiot, I guess.

This feels like the right song to end on.