My dad told me to look one way before crossing the street.

He also told me that it was state law that I had to wave at everyone I met while driving. I still try to do that, but it leaves me exhausted after a day of motoring around Minneapolis. I’ve made it easier for myself. I wave at everyone I meet on a gravel road. Dad told me that I could judge the quality of a café by the number of calendars hanging on its walls. That was true, but calendars don’t hang around as much as they used to.

We joke about our fathers. Some fathers are jokes. A friend told me that he never knew his father. Never heard from him. Not a letter. Not a phone call. Nothing.

My father was always there for me whether I wanted him to be or not.

Bern Williams wrote, “Sooner or later we all quote our mothers.”

I’d add that sooner or later we all quote our fathers.

Dad never once said, “You’re cruising for a bruising” or anything resembling this odd conversation between a neighbor boy and father as I helped them bale hay.

“Dad, I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Well, I want to be king of the world.”

Dad wasn’t much of a cook, but he fed us when he needed to. Toast and a small tin of Vienna sausage washed down with a glass of Tang was Dad’s specialty. He liked creamed asparagus on toast, German potato salad and chicken. Of all the parts of a chicken, he preferred the neck. My mother was a great cook who made everything taste like it needed to be eaten, and her chicken was powerful good. Why the neck? Dad claimed he liked it. Not much meat there. If you were going to survive on chicken necks, you’d want to cross a chicken with a giraffe. He ate the neck so that the other members of the family could have the prime parts.

My father didn’t answer the telephone. He didn’t negotiate with terrorists. He’d talk on it, but someone else had to answer a call.

I made the mistake of telling my father that I was bored. I did that once.

My father asked me, “Do you know what I’d do if I were bored?”

“No, I don’t,” I replied.

He said he didn’t know what he’d do either as he’d never been bored. Then he told me to clean the henhouse and be bored no more. Cleaning the henhouse was a crummy job. That’s why neither Sarah Palin nor Hillary Clinton has campaigned for the position of chicken-house cleaner.

My father wore bib overalls as the uniform of choice for his workday. The varied pockets held a day’s work. Pencils, pliers, notebook, tape measure, Barlow jackknife — there was even a loop on a pants leg to hold a hammer.

Dad enjoyed hunting. I’m not much of a hunter. I have a boot with the toe shot off mounted on the wall of my office as a testament to the only time I went hunting.

My father said that you could tell a farmer’s competence by how straight the cornrows were planted. Especially those rows that bordered roads. Blessed is he who plants corn in straight rows. He was blessed.

I gave him advice that he was much too wise to take.

His word was the equivalent of a notarized contract. His handshake was a contract. He never counted his fingers afterwards.

Prevarication was rarer than a picked rock that looked heavier than it really was.

One year, Dad had hoped to buy a better tractor. He’d saved up a bit of cash for that purpose. Then other equipment required repair and the money was gone. There’d be no tractor upgrade.

I thought Dad would take the disappointment poorly, but he said, “I did without it yesterday. I can do without it tomorrow.”

He was of the generation of men that found it difficult to say, “I love you.” But I knew he loved me and I loved him.

Dad was adamant about doing business with those who would attend his funeral. I found that peculiar, but I knew what he meant. Cling to those close to you.

He thought that no one would miss him when he was gone. He was wrong.

 

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.