Category Archives: nostalgia

Dad’s Christmas Story

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My dad had a radio show for many years at WTBQ radio station in upstate New York. He would send me his transcripts in email and I saved them. My plan was to edit them and create a book for him. This turned out to be a larger project than I could handle. After he died in 2006, I was able to hire professional editors to edit the transcripts and I put together a book. I also put the writings online here.

While my dad was at WTBQ they recorded “A Hometown Christmas” show and they play it each year for the holidays.

Here is my dad’s piece:

ballet

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I studied ballet for about six years when I was young. I loved it. I had a friend, Molly, who was older than me who took me under her wing and encouraged me. My level had to wear leotards and standard tu-tus. Her level wore beautiful sheer mid-calf angled skirts. I thought those rayon skirts were so graceful and looked forward to when I earned wearing them too.

The ballet slippers were supple in my hands with a specific sweet tangy scent of the pink leather. There was a promise of beauty in those slippers – of grace and an orchestrated story waiting to unfold.

There are photos of young me front and center in performances, and like any young ballerina, I dreamed of being Clara in The Nutcracker.

My mom and I moved to a different city, different state, mid-way through middle school. If I wanted to continue my lessons I had to ride my bicycle across two major streets into the neighboring city. This didn’t last long and thus my dancing days were over.

When I was 19 I tried taking lessons. I put on a leotard and felt awkward and clunky. After a few classes, I folded up the leotard and put it away.

Sometimes dreams don’t happen and if you revisit them the dream has changed enough to where it doesn’t exist anymore.

more human than human

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I’ve been missing my dad this past week or so and I just now figured out why. Of course. It’s Holiday Season…with all the talk of family get-togethers and such. And this is one of the first years in many that my mom’s side of the family hasn’t done a good Thanksgiving gathering.

But when I really think about holiday family gatherings and my dad, I have to admit that he was usually an ass. He had a tenuous relationship with his family – they were all very close, but he was considered (or perhaps moreso considered himself) the black sheep of the family. So, as tends to happen during these festivities, they were often fraught with difficulties.

I remember one Christmas in New York with my dad’s family where he taught me how to pour him a proper drink (2-3 fingers full with a couplea ice cubes) and we played hours of Atari. That was great for me, but in retrospect, it was rather rude of him.

There was a Christmas where he came to Illinois to have the holiday with my mom and grandparents. I think we were having a big extended family get-together that year. It was the one and only time we did that. Dad was drinking a lot and was rather unpleasant. Nothing terrible, just not fun to be around. He spent a fair amount of time alone in the basement drinking and smoking cigarettes and being rather anti-social and surly. My mom was furious. I was young and just knew that dad wasn’t being a good guest and kept trying to keep him entertained.

When you are a kid, you think that adults have things figured out. That somewhere along the line they realized how to live life. But as you grow older, at some point not only do you realize that your parents were just flying by the seat of their pants, but suddenly you are in your late thirties or forties and realize you don’t know jack…and here you are a full-fledged “adult”.

I don’t know if that realization frightened me or just made me kind of sad.

The knowledge that my dad didn’t know shit and was just doing the best he could, well, I guess it sucks when you realize that your folks are human. Humans are fallible and have the ability to fuck things up. When you are a kid, you see your parents as more than human (and not like the White Zombie song, although I have met some ‘rents who might fit that category. Maybe there really are replicants running around posing as humans. But I digress) and when you realize that they are just plain ole’ people it can be disappointing. What have we to look forward to if we are just going to grow up into staying plain ole’ people? I was kinda hoping to grow up and become one of those infallible “adults.”