Dammit Dorothy! 55th Addition

Dammit Dorothy!
Here is what I know about my father:

My sources are varied and include my Mother, my Dad’s family, friends, my siblings, and me. This guarantees that most of this information is incorrect, or at least only partially accurate. But that is how we are supposed to see our parents.

1. When he began to crawl, he would sort of swim his way across the floor in a beating fashion. Thus he was given the name B’der (as in "gee, he sure looks a lot like an egg beater. Let us all point and laugh”). He did demonstrate great coordination in later years, particularly as a skier.
2. He built a bed frame for his sister’s college roommate for which he was never paid.
3. His first car was a Subaru named “Baby Roo.”
4. My Father taught all of his children how to ski. He had been a volunteer sit ski teacher for paraplegics which had taught him to utilize nylon tethers to assist in steering and controlling his student’s speed. When it was his second daughter’s turn to learn, the tethers caused her to fall on her face repeatedly, and every time he picked her up from the snow, red-faced and freezing, he would yell “FACE PLANT.” In time, she got over the humiliation and learned to love skiing as much as he did.
5. His daughters’ frequent habit of sneaking into a second movie after only paying for one morally disturbs him.
6. He is a member of the Fraternal Order of Sigma Chi.
7. When he got married, one of his fraternity brothers wired his Volkswagen Jetta to sound the horn every time he made a left turn. One rainy day, the horn went off and refused to quit while my father was stopped at a red light behind a police officer. For whatever reason, the officer was not amused by the prank.
8. He has a twelve inch scar from his navel to his sternum from when he had his spleen removed.
9. He rescued a box turtle from the jaws of one of our dogs and subsequently named it Mordecai. Eventually, Mordicai was released into the wild and the memory would be renamed Mortimer. Every time he saw another box turtle, he would proudly proclaim that “Mort’s back!” Even after we moved from Kansas City to Maryland, every time a turtle crossed our yard or driveway, he would announce Mort’s return and corral the dogs into the house so that the turtle could continue on its journey safely.
10. He loves old time Radio Theater, and he downloads podcasts of them to listen to on the train to work.
11. He bakes pies with varying degrees of success.
12. When our cousin, Matthew, came to our house in Missouri one summer to help my father build a fence, he left with a severe case of poison ivy and a face that had swelled to twice its usual size. Later that summer, when the entire family had convened to celebrate another nephew’s wedding in Florida, my father took an afternoon to track down a Hobby Lobby and a Walgreens drug store for supplies to build a crown made of ivy and bejeweled with Benadryl tablets. He then presented the crown to Matt during the rehearsal dinner. Three years later, Matt enlisted in the Marines and his childhood bedroom was cleared out. Few things remained from summers past, but the crown survived and was carefully hung from a curtain rod.
13. On weekends, he watches old movies for the purpose of napping through them.
14. After visiting Old Sturbridge Village with his son, he returned home and built a replica carving bench similar to one he had seen at the historical reenactment site. For several weeks, he would come home from work and go out into the garage and carve a wooden spoon out of cherry.
15. He made a topsider deck shoe in ceramics when he was in high school.
16. He has a terrible sense of direction and once spent an hour driving north towards Boston before he realized he needed to be going south to get to Georgia.
17. He managed to break is leg while playing soccer and the goalie landed on him as he was scoring a goal. That happened at the end of the school year before his family’s first summer at Eastman, a nearby lake. Since swimming was out, he ensconced himself in a rubber raft, cast and all, and floated around on the pond for a few weeks. As the years went by, he made a nice niche for himself at Eastman and taught soccer and sailing and became known by most of the residents at that time. He was fondly called "Mr. Eastman".
18. Dad taught himself how to draw Donald Duck the summer he broke his leg. Twenty years later, he would teach his daughters how to draw Donald-- It begins with an upside down U, and is followed by two C’s facing each other. Next comes the sideways fishhook for the bill, the ‘M’ for the tongue, the nostrils, the eyes, and so on until the eyebrows. His younger daughter would doodle the duck in the margins of her math worksheets until she was informed by a classmate that all her Donalds looked like frogs. The addition of a few feathers at the top of his head was enough to remedy this, but she couldn’t help but think she had compromised the integrity of his original design.
19. His middle name is B-- that’s it, just B. Not Bea, Bee, B., or Bí. It doesn’t stand for anything. He is Howard B Green.
20. When he was interviewing to go to college, his parents gave him an airplane ticket to travel to various schools. He made his choice quite evident when he arrived home wearing a University of Puget Sound t-shirt.
21. The first time he saw my mother, he was moving back into the House his Junior year of college. He drove past her in his old Subaru. The sun was low. It was late summer. She was sitting on a low brick wall while smoking a cigarette. She wore a white button down shirt with the sleeves rolled back, a tapestry skirt, and a pair of clogs with wooden soles.
22. My mother knew she was in love with my Father after he made her a cake and iced it with Aquafresh Toothpaste.
23. He shares his birthday with his cousin Amy. As a stingy 7-year-old, he denied this for years. His birthday was his and his alone.
24. The girl who worked at the snack bar at Eastman would mix orange soda and root beer for him when he was done teaching sailing lessons, and he occasionally reprises the combination for the sake of nostalgia.
25. He regularly gets mistaken as being Jewish.
26. Like Indiana Jones, he hates snakes. When we lived in Missouri, they would occasionally slide inside and he would be called upon to dispatch them. One unfortunate garter snake (who’s size and viciousness has only increased with time) made his way between the sheets under which my aunt was about to get. Dad was called to remove the creature, so he grabbed a pair of child-sized ski gloves, seized the snake and flung it 30 feet into the woods, unleashing an epic string of profanities for the entire neighborhood to hear.
27. When he was in College, the whole Green clan gathered in Chagrin Falls at Uncle Doug and Aunt Trudy's house for Thanksgiving. No one expected him to make the trip from UPS but, somehow, he did, surprising almost everyone. The trip had taken its toll, leaving him exhausted, and he spent the most of the vacation sleeping.
28. He got his first parking ticket in the parking lot of the local movie theater. He’d had his license for 10 days, walked away for 2 minutes, remembered he had to pay and was handed the parking ticket directly by an unsympathetic officer.
29. When he was about 8, he came home from school one day and his mother had just come in from an interview for a job at the nursing school. When he asked where she had been and she told him, he then said "do you know enough?" Made her think it was time for her to get out of the house and go to work.
30. He has broken his collarbone five times, once while flying a kite.
31. While the family was gathered for dinner at the country club, he and his sister Carrie perfected the art of rolling their eyes individually, starting with one eye at one corner, rolling it to the other corner, and then doing the same with the second eye. They had the cousins in hysterics, though his parents were less than thrilled.
32. During one of his cross country drives from New Hampshire to UPS, his car broke down in Birmingham. His parents wanted to take him to the Club for a meal but he didn't have suitable attire. He had to borrow his father’s clothes as well as a pair of shoes. His father had very long and narrow feet and the shoes were like clown shoes on my father.
33. My father always invited his younger cousin Amy to participate in "big kid things," both as kids and young adults. Since she was roughly 5 years younger than the next cousin, she had always felt that the age gap was huge and that she was the baby, particularly since everyone else was clustered together. He reached out to bridge the gap, which she always appreciated.
34. When he is pissed off, rather than swearing at his children, or yelling at his wife, he yells “Dammit Dorothy!” He has never been able to give a satisfactory explanation as to who Dorothy is and what she ever did to offend him, but the family has learned to leave the room anytime we hear her name.
35. Dad likes to do home improvement projects himself. Over the years, he has taught himself how to be an electrician, a plumber, washing machine repair man, and stone mason. His least favorite task is applying joint compound to the corners of a room.
36. His oldest daughter was cut from the UPS soccer team so he suggested she try being a coxswain for the crew team. Little did he know that he would be responsible for her lifelong passion/obsession.
37. Every move we have made since leaving the house on York Street near downtown Denver, we have taken some of the old foundation stones from the old house. His employer has always refused to pay to move building materials, a caveat which my father has gotten around by listing the stones as his “Mother in Law’s Headstone” on the packing list.
38. Every weekend we would watch the 1960’s cult TV show Wild Wild West and Looney Toons.
39. He used to ride his bike to work and to take his daughters to preschool. His oldest claims that these early experiences are responsible for why she has never learned to ride a bike.
40. My father likes elegant solutions that kill multiple birds with a single stone. He doesn’t get excited about much, but we once sat in the car for twenty minutes while he related a story he had heard about how the National Archive digitizes texts that word-recognition software cannot interpret by inputting the illegible words as a Captcha on websites like Ticketmaster. Rather than going through, word by word, and entering them each individually, when the Captcha is typed in, it is immediately entered into the database without wasting valuable man hours.
41. He bought a 1967 Silver Landrover Discovery at the Stanley British Primary School Auction and drove it for the next 6 years. The Rover often refused to start when the weather got too cold, so my father would have to hand crank it until the engine roared to life.
42. After one of his daughters removed the right side-view mirror from his 97 Camry when she hit a stop sign, he replaced it with a mirror he ordered from ebay. The gold mirror that arrived did not come close to matching the red Camry, but was henceforth referred to as the car’s “bling.”
43. He thinks that Bono from U2 sounds constipated when he sings.
44. Every year, in October, TBS would Run the 13 Days of Bond, and show two James Bond Movies a night for nearly two weeks. My father would let us watch the first one and send us to bed before the second one started. One night, I had been home all day with the flu, and I had camped out on the couch with a pillow and blankets. I lay there with my head on his lap and his warm hand on my shoulder while we watched the first one and when the second one started, he didn’t send me to bed. So I stayed there with him feeling warm and safe.
45. He first met his in-laws at a Salmon Bake in Seattle. When my parents got married, his in-laws told my mother that they would miss her if my parents ever got divorced.
46. Every time we woke up too early to drive to Winter Park to go skiing, he would look at us, sigh, and say “Who’s bright idea was this anyway?”
47. When his oldest and flawless daughter called in tears to tell him that she had been caught by security while trespassing and drinking underage, he replied, “About fucking time!”
48. During an early attempt at home improvement, he put his foot through the ceiling while rewiring the attic. His oldest recalls this as being Dorothy’s first appearance.
49. He dispenses fatherly advice self-consciously because he worries that he sounds like his own father. The follow-up emails that explained how proud he is of his children whatever their decisions, proved that he wasn’t.
50. The years we lived in Denver, my father would get up at 5 am in early December to wait in line for the newest KBCO Studio C album. When is middle child moved back to Colorado, she revived the tradition.
51. My father loves his children with all the warmth and pride they deserve, but he is proudest of his dogs, a pair of quirky, athletic, and idiosyncratic vizsla. He likes to show them off at dog parks and on the beach, delighting in the beauty of how they run. When he is down, my Father looks at pictures of vizsla puppies.
52. His curly black hair has transitioned gracefully into a dignified, wavy pewter.
53. When he plays the board game, Clue, he always chooses to play Mr. Green
54. He took his daughters to their first rock concerts: Jimmy Buffett and the Barenaked Ladies. An he wonders why they are such huge dorks.
55. He turns 55 today. Happy Birthday, Daddy!