Dan Jenkins wrote, “You have to laugh trouble down to a size where you can talk to it.” But the loss of a father, a good father, is very big trouble, and he was the one person who could laugh that down to size for me. As his daughter, I’m here to tell you he was full of as much wit in person as he was in print. You see my problem.
He was not what you would call a classic family man, because sportswriters drive against the normal traffic of life. He worked on Saturdays and Sundays and was gone on most holidays. His presence on weekends and Thanksgivings was a phantom one on the rabbit-eared TV set that my mother turned on to show us where he was, saying, “Do you understand how hard your father works?” He acknowledged his absences with the kind of drollery that characterized his parenting style. “Don’t rob old people,” he
would say as he headed off.
He was an unindicted co-conspirator, constantly in trouble with my mother for his scandalously unorthodox child-rearing. One afternoon in our hometown of Fort Worth, when I was about 7, he drove my two brothers and me the wrong way down a quiet one-way street. Delighted, I stared at the baffled drivers and street signs pointed in the opposite direction. “People are easily led,” he instructed.
Yet in my estimation, he was a better father than nine-tenths of those I knew. Granted, growing up I thought everybody’s father drank 10 cups of coffee and smoked three packs a day, and wrote novels on vacations, and got hate mail from Notre Damers, and wore Gucci loafers with no socks, and swore like a janitor every time he put up the Christmas tree, and became the most influential sportswriter of his generation. Mainly, I thought all fathers were the drop-dead funniest guys on earth who could
make three pajamaed-urchin children capsize their glasses of milk with convulsive giggling...
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