Tales from the Dad Side Read Online Free PDF Page B

voice my concerns at our first parent-teacher conference.
    â€œAre you out of your mind having Mace around children?” I flat out told her thirty seconds after cooing, “So nice to meet you. Peter simply adores you.”
    â€œMace?”
    â€œPeter told me you have some sort of aerosolized weapon.”
    â€œI wouldn’t even know where to buy Mace.” She sounded so innocent, but don’t they always, the superguilty?
    Pitiful getting caught red-handed and then lying directly to me at our first face-to-face. As she yammered and stammered I looked over her shoulder momentarily and noticed a stuffed tiger just like the one my father had brought back from the army. It sat next to a shelf that had four gleaming cans of industrial-strength Aqua Net.
    Protection in a can.
    She wasn’t packing poison gas; she had been talking about extra-super-hold unscented aerosol protection for her hair . Slowly my eyes returned to the teacher’s head, and indeed she had an inflexible beehive that would surely remain in a fixed position during a subtropical cyclone.
    â€œMace, schmace,” I blurted out, trying to change the subject. “The main thing I wanted to address is the egg timer.”
    She was surely relieved that I was no longer accusing her of warehousing a weapon of mass disruption, but I knew in my heart that she would forever quietly categorize me as some nut dad who spent nights listening to Art Bell on the radio while waiting for the day that scientists could perfect a robot wife that was affordable and reliable.
    â€œI’ve always used it, but from now on, I’ll make sure he knows the timer is about to ring, so it doesn’t scare him.” I was delighted to hear her say that, and true to her word, he was not petrified again during that year, when she went through enough hair spray to carve a quarter-mile-wide hole in the ozone over Helsinki.
    The egg timer and Mace case illustrate how as a father I made it my job to protect my kids, regardless of reason. When I was in school my teacher asked my parents how they felt about in-class discipline, and my father told them it was okay with him to spank me if I was asking for it. How quaint. If a kid got a dose of discipline today with a school paddling, before the kid’s butt cooled down, there certainly would be a caravan of live trucks outside the school and Shepard Smith demanding to know, “Was there screaming?”
    Okay, so corporal punishment has been banned, but why has common sense also gone the way of the passenger pigeon?
    â€œExcuse me,” Sally asked her science teacher during a discussion on cloning. “Is it Dolly llama or Dolly the lamb?” An innocent question—she had a general idea that there was one of both; one was a cloned critter, the other a picture in Richard Gere’s wallet.
    â€œMiss Doocy, a public school is no place to poke fun at a religious leader like the Dalai Lama,” the teacher said. “You’re trying to be funny. I’ve seen your father, and you’re a family of jokers.”
    For the record, we may be jokers, and we also have a riddler in the family, but when did every harmless ad-lib become a potentialthree-day suspension? The Dalai Lama versus Dolly the lamb scandal earned Sally some stern words from a humorless administrator, and her parents were paralyzed with fear that a notation of “religious intolerance” would be placed in her permanent record.
    â€œDon’t worry about that,” the principal assured us, which only made us positive they’d already written those exact words in big red block letters across the top of her transcript, making it impossible that she’d ever be elected pope.
    Pondering the ramifications of a tainted permanent record forever haunting a person with its litany of juvenile indiscretions chronicled for posterity, I took the ultimate step in coming face-to-face with my own checkered past.
    â€œHi.