When I was about five, my father was having breakfast one morning when he tore a hole in his toast trying to spread a pat of hard butter over it. He glowered at the mangled toast and said, “In this world nothing makes us more miserable than death, taxes, and hard butter.” He said this with solemnity, as if he were quoting some luminary to shed light on the morning’s breakfast glitch.
Around that same time, I unearthed some moldy cheese from the refrigerator and was about to toss it in the garbage when my father stopped me. “Mold is good for you,” he said, chewing confidently on a piece of Swiss cheese with dark splotches. “People who ate mold strengthened their immune systems and survived the journey on the Mayflower. Those who didn’t eat it died.” Believing his apocryphal story, I grew up thinking that a little mold never hurt anyone. However, decades later, when I told my wife about the supposed link between mold and a stronger immune system after finding some moldy cheese in the refrigerator, she rolled her eyes and insisted I toss it in the garbage.
On another occasion around my fifth year, my father and I were driving when he lowered the sun visor to block the bright light. I asked him how far the sun was from Earth. He told me the exact distance: ninety-three million miles. “How did you know that?” I asked. Without missing a beat, he said, “I’m your father, son. Fathers know everything.” This made sense to me because my father was, after all, an engineer at IBM. I knew he was the head person there because when he took me to work on Father-Son Day, everyone half-jokingly referred to him as The Big Cheese.
Once I understood my father’s intellectual and engineering powers, I told the kids at the Royal Lanai apartments that he could transform the playground rocket ship into an actual spaceship that would take us to Mars. Like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin, five of us sat in the apartment garage waiting for my father to return from work in his red 1966 MGB Roadster convertible, and we cheered when he arrived. But when we asked him to use his engineering skills to make the playground rocket ship space-ready, he told us he didn’t have the required licensing from NASA to send it into outer space. With our dreams shattered, we had to console ourselves by watching the adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson on Lost in Space.
The one dubious thing my father told me that I think about more than any other happened at the 1967 grand opening of a Taco Bell in San Jose. I noticed that the people working behind the registers had unsightly marks on their faces. I asked my father what those blemishes were, and without a pause he said, “Those are pimples, son. According to Aristotle, God gives teenagers pimples to teach them humility.” Barely six years old, I had never heard the word humility before, but from the context, I had a strong understanding of its meaning. It was the opposite of arrogance. I knew what arrogance was because one of my favorite cartoons was The World of Commander McBragg. The Commander was a blowhard who would trap his victims in his room and force them to listen to his tedious, grandiose adventure stories in which the Commander was always the hero.
Like the Commander, my father was a mythologist who spun fable-like stories and theories as naturally as a fish swims. Part of me knew he was being flexible with the truth, but I didn’t care because he was always entertaining and thought-provoking. My father was transmitting an unspoken message: Life is generally speaking boring. You have to spice it up a bit. Therefore, if you’re waiting in line at Taco Bell for some burritos and pintos and cheese, you might as well come up with some crazy theory about why teenagers are annoying and could use a dose of humility to counteract their hubris.
Or perhaps the theory wasn’t so crazy after all. Aristotle did speak about youthful arrogance: “They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.” The irony, of course, is that my father was a perennial teenager in search of some tonic that might temper his cocksure certainty with a tincture of doubt.
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