It isn’t fair, but it is true, that parents are often defined in their children’s minds by random inconsequential moments that somehow create lasting and overarching imprints.
These snippets of memory stay with a child into adulthood and are drawn upon, no matter how false or incomplete they may be, to illustrate their mother or father’s personhood.
Take an average morning some months ago when I was readying for work and my children for school.
With a towel wrapped around my waist I stood at the bathroom sink preparing to shave. My 11-year-old son knocked on the door and announced he needed to brush his teeth.
“Come on,” I said. “Hurry up, I need to shave.”
As he was assembling the tools for teeth brushing, I asked if there was anything going on at school that day.
“We might have another substitute teacher,” he said.
“Another?” I said. “Is your teacher sick?”
“Yes,” he said. “You want to know something weird? We had a substitute teacher yesterday and the day before that and they were both named Mrs. Jones.”
That was a coincidence, I conceded.
And then, without thinking about it at all, I made one of those lasting impressions in my son’s mind. One he is likely never to forget. One he pull from the time vault whenever he is trying to convince a friend – or a shrink -- that his father was bizarre.
“You know what you should do if you go in today and your teacher is Mrs. Jones?” I asked. “You should go up to her and sing,” and I grabbed a hair brush off the counter and held it up like a microphone and belted out, “Me annnd . . . Mrs. Joooones, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones. We got a thing goin’ on.”
I thought it was a pretty fine, throaty rendition of the R&B song by Billy Paul, but the look on my son’s face was one of pure horror.
He dropped his toothbrush and fled the bathroom, leaving me standing there in a towel holding a hairbrush microphone.
“She’ll think it’s pretty funny,” I called after his hurriedly retreating back.
I knew immediately the import of the moment. There was no taking it back. The damage was done.
Years from now, my son will relate to friends or his wife – or his shrink -- how his father was a bit of a nut.
“My father thought he was funny. He used to stand in front of the mirror in a towel and sing like a maniac into a hairbrush,” he’ll say.
“One time!” I will shout down from heaven. “It happened one time!”
But I know it will do no good.
I know because I tell people how odd my father was when I was growing up.
I tell people, for example, how he was a sun-worshipper. Just imagine the embarrassment, I say, of coming home with friends and finding your father stretched out in the backyard on a reclining lawn chair, sipping iced tea, wearing a pair of tight shorts and glistening with coconut-scented Coppertone.
I relate also how he took to wearing fishnet, thin shoulder-strapped tank tops (popular in the late ‘70s) to show off his bronzed torso.
“Oh, the horror,” I thought then. “My father is such a freak.”
Looking back now, it may be a mischaracterization.
It may have been only one summer that he became obsessed with tanning, and who wants to be defined as a person by three months of your life?
Looking back now, I think maybe it was a source of relaxation, a little time away from four rambunctious, ornery boys.
Looking back now, it occurs to me he was probably approaching 40 and may have been going through a period of increased concern about his appearance. It was, after all, around the same time he started working out.
But all that is what I have reasoned; it is not what I remember.
What I remember is the horror.
The difference between my dad then and me now is that I don’t think he grasped the lasting impression he was making on his kids with the sunbathing thing.
Me?
As soon as my son dashed from the room, I knew. I knew what was racing through his mind.
“Oh, the horror,” he was thinking. “My dad is a freak!”
And there was nothing to be done about it but turn back to the mirror, raise the hairbrush, and, in my best impersonation of Rick James, sing, “My dad’s a freak, a super freak.”
I can only hope my son didn’t hear me.
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