I USED WHAT YOU TAUGHT ME. IT KEPT ME ALIVE!

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

"Daaaaad?"

My voice quivered a little as I spoke the word.

When the Grand Old Man answered the phone, it was with a guarded, "hel-LO," which translates to IT'S AFTER DARK AND THIS HAD DAMN WELL BETTER BE IMPORTANT! -- something I knew before I punched his number into the pay phone.
"I used what you taught me," I said, trying to keep my voice from wavering, "and it kept me alive!"

There was a looonnnggg silence, and then he said quietly, "What happened?"

 

I'd been driving to Dover on route 250: there's a little town called Wilmot, home of the World's Largest Cuckoo Clock, and a state route crossing 250 at a long angle.

I was driving my wife's steel-grey Pontiac Grand Am; I was following an eighteen; I looked to the right, at another eighteen coming down the intersecting road.

We were stopped at a red light.

The truck ahead of me thought he'd be a good Joe and back up to let this fellow make his swing around that tight refex-angle turn.

He didn't see me.

I looked in my rearview -- a power truck, a big one, with a bridge I-beam for a front bumper, and he's right on my bumper.
No backing up to escape.

If I lay on the horn, likely he won't hear me over his engine, and he'll never know he ran right over me.

My father, bless him, taught me to drive: he drove truck, he taught me to stop where the driver can see me in his mirror -- why he did not, I don't know, other than a streamlined, steel-grey Pontiac must have camouflaged nicely into the pavement's color -- but dear old Dad also taught me to leave enough room to maneuver.

"Engineering," I called, "I want full impulse on my mark.  Helm, hard right, PUNCH IT SCOTTY!" -- and my well polished Wellington did its level best to mash the go pedal right through the firewall.

I romped the wife's low-slung Pontiac over the curb, across the neatly-mowed tree lawn, into the gas station lot:  I swung around, came out behind the intersecting tractor-trailer, threw a grin and a wave to the eighteen that almost backed over me (he was giving me a reeeeally funny look!) -- hard a-starboard, back into 250, and I shook like a whore in church all the way to the JVS, where the Advanced Wastewater adult-ed class was being held that night.

My cell didn't have signal enough to do squat, so I punched up the pay phone and told my father that what he taught me, kept me alive that night.

Friends, kindred and brethren, if your father yet lives, call him up, go see him, tell him in plain language something that he taught you, that did you a benefit: several times since, I've called or visited, once I showed him a picture on my cell phone, a picture of a floor corner in my bedroom.

Dear old Dad taught me to cut a mitered 45-degree angle on baseboard and quarter-round alike:  it turned out square and tight, and I showed it to him and said "You taught me to do that," and I could not have pleased the man any more if I'd handed him a hundred-dollar bill.

 

 

[Michigan Slim]

I don't believe I ever did. But he saw me doing things like he showed me. My son has said it to me and it made me feel like a million bucks.

[J-BAR #18287]

I envy you guys.

[Choctaw Jack]

My son is about to turn 35 years old.Seems like since he turned 30,the older he gets the smarter I get.

Choctaw Jack 

[Grumpy Old Man]

when I was 16, I thought he was the dumbest guy on earth. It's amazing how much he learned in the next 4 years.

[Michigan Slim]

You ain't just whistling Dixie.