In which my dad makes an appearance

Since I've been having a pretty hard time with my father of late -- not the worst time I've ever had with him by a long shot, but a challenging stretch nonetheless -- it occurred to me that this would be a good time to focus on some good things about him and our relationship, since there are quite a few.

There's no particular chronology here, and I'll get around to providing background as needed. For a start, my dad's 80. His employment history is as follows: age 12, pin boy at the bowling alley; age 16, started in the steel mill; Korean War, volunteered for combat but spent the war at Fort Dix in the Signal Corps; postwar, left the mills for the phone company at half the pay; went from lineman to installer to switchman, met my mom in the process, and thirty years later still had a job while all the mills were shutting down. He has lived in exactly two houses: the one in Duquesne that he grew up in, and the one he moved into when he married at age 34. He can best be described as a David Cronenberg-esque genetic mashup between Fred Rogers and Don Knotts, about a 30%/70% ratio. Fortunately for me, I got my mother's eyes; otherwise I'd be doomed.

I've spent a lot of time on a barstool next to him at the VFW (Hilltopper Post 8430, with a phone number I've had memorized since I was ten). From the day I was old enough to sit at the bar, we were partners in crime, tormenting George the bartender, who made Coach from Cheers look like Bertrand Fucking Russell. My dad's favorite technique was flummoxing him with half dollars and $2 bills, while I preferred bringing the TV remote from home and surreptitiously changing the channels on the bar TV. He never caught on.

My most special memories of the VFW, though, aren't of the super-cheap drinks, the Jukebox of Misery, the Tijuana Mama pickled sausages, the mesmerizing displays of military insignia patches, or even of harassing George. The best memories are of my dad's supernatural wallet.

Stupendously fat wallets aren't uncommon. Witness George Costanza's, thick enough - thanks to his sugar packets and receipts for everything he's ever bought - to throw his spine out of whack. The world is full of old men carting around billfolds that haven't been cleaned out since the Eisenhower administration, full of expired membership cards and school photos of grandchildren.

But I promise you, my father's is in a class by itself.

To begin with, it is a testament to the absolute indestructibility of kangaroo leather. It is the only wallet I've ever known him to have, and shows no sign of giving out anytime soon. Contributing to this somewhat may be the fact that, as my father has no ass whatsoever, the wallet when in his back pocket sort of floats in space, suspended by the cloth but not wearing against any surface. This absence of abrasion has surely contributed to its lifespan.

A large part of the sheer mass of stuff he keeps in there is of an arguably practical nature. Since he belongs to about seventy-three different lodges, veterans' groups, and fraternal organizations, and since each issues both a membership card and a key card, that accounts for many ounces of wallet-weight. Then there are the usual stuff that any normal person carries: AAA, owner's card, health insurance cards, PBS and NPR station donor discount cards, appointment cards from a cadre of doctors, lottery tickets....okay, now we're approaching the periphery of the normal range. A few Sunday donation envelopes for the church he hasn't set foot in for over thirty years. A spare house key that fit the lock two doorknob changes ago. Hmm.

That would make for a slightly chubby wallet, but my dad's doesn't stop there or anywhere near there. VFW drink chips are crammed in there, lists of prescriptions, the phone numbers of everyone he knows on individual slips of paper. He has an emery board folded in half in there. This is a wallet one of the Collyer brothers would have had. Have you ever heard the old joke about the guy with a wallet made from an elephant's foreskin? Punchline: rub it and it turns into a suitcase. You're getting the picture.

Dad's wallet defies the laws of time and space as we know them. H.P. Lovecraft would have envied his wallet. I exaggerate not a whit when I tell you that it contains an extensive reference library, right there in his pants pocket.

In 1989, when Ford was in talks to purchase Jaguar, Dad and I were at the bar, tormenting George, and the network news was on. When Dan Rather or whoever the hell it was started talking about the proposed deal, and a few of the geezers started murmuring about it, my dad said, "Yeah, there was something in the paper this morning..." and reached for the wallet and extracted a newspaper article about that very deal. Hand to god. Wait, it gets better. In 2000, when Ford bought Land Rover -- exact same thing.

Better example, with psychic overtones: No television this time, just a couple of the old farts jawing about how in the motherfucking fuck does the state milk board set the milk prices anyway. (How or why this topic arose is something that hurts my brain too much to consider.) By this time I should have been used to this, but no, my jaw still hit the bar when my dad announced that he had "something about that right here," and from the Twilight Zone of his wallet produced a clipping about the milk board.

Remember on Let's Make A Deal, how Monty Hall used to go into the audience and issue challenges like "$50 to anybody with a fountain pen!" My dad would have been so on top of that. "$500 for anyone who's got an egg!" I am completely confident that my dad could have promptly stuck his spindly fingers into the creases of his wallet and pulled out an egg, be it raw, hard-boiled, poached, or ostrich.

I prefer to keep my own wallet as trim as possible, although all of my pockets are usually full up with stuff (see post above). But whenever I see Dad's multidimensional wallet I can't help but admire it, even as I shudder at the thought of shlepping it around.