While in Taiwan, my friend and I liked to compare our dads, competing to see whose was weirder. Hers, a doctor, had once excitedly rushed home for dinner, at which point he had his family sit down and continually twist their feet to the right. “Now,” he cried, preparing them for the crowning achievement, “twist your hand to the left!” Triumphantly, he watched them all stall in place. He had discovered this phenomenon while doing paperwork in his office.
My dad has this guy covered.
Take the other day, for instance. My mom and dad had been measuring furniture that they wanted to post on Ebay. Later, as we sat around the kitchen table, my dad whipped out the tape measure and snapped it out from his seat to the nearest kitchen cabinet. “Hey! Hey!” he announced, “if I want to get a piece of chocolate, I’ll have to go seven feet to get it. By the time I get back, I’ll have gone fourteen feet! By that time, I’ll be ready for another piece. Better take an extra for the road.”
They’re selling their furniture because they are moving to Israel. In August. They’re downscaling from a fourteen-room house to an apartment with a four-by-six dining area. Just about everything must go. As the announcements go out to the community and eBay, even I have taken to wandering around, seeing what I might like to scavenge for myself. Faced with a future ~$650/month apartment in Brooklyn and more simplistic taste than my parents (Queen Anne vs. American Craftsman), my choices are pretty minimal.
-“I saw you have two of those three-step stepladders. I’ll take one if you don’t need both in Israel.” My dad looks up from his furniture spreadsheet.
-“We can give you the first two steps.” And back down to the computer screen.
-“But seriously dad, I need to figure out what I can afford and where I’m going. When do I have to move out by?” He looks back up.
-“What time is it?”
They’ve been practicing their Hebrew, as well. Every time they have to fix or replace something for the people buying our house, my dad stares down at the hardware in his hands and wonders how you say “bolt,” “biscuit-shooter,” and “bottle-nosed pliers” in the Holy Language. They’ve already discovered that plywood is called “sandwich,” leading to a host of terrible puns regarding lunch items and a certain English nobleman. Today, we found a couple cartons of berries going bad in the fridge. I muttered, my mom called out that the strawberries should be at their sweetest now—as apparently they are at their ripest, juiciest (if mushiest) best right before they rot—and that we’d received the blackberries old from a friend anyway, and my dad launched into a loud and energetic rendition of “Great Green Globs of Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts.” He strolled through the first floor singing it two or three times and then we heard a noticeable pause. Hesitantly at first, and then ever more confidently, he switched the lyrics and belted out “chavalim shel gopher batanim, chavalim shel gopher batanim, CHAVALIM SHEL gopher BATANIM!!!” Yes, “gopher guts” in Hebrew. My mom and I rolled our eyes and put our head in our hands. He moved on to another part of the song. “But I forgot my spoon! ...Aval shachachti et ha…aval shachachti et ha…ha…” He appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Alana, how do you say spoon?” “Kapit.” “Aval shachachti et ha kapit sheLEE!!!” Congrats, dad. You’re totally ready to move.
This has all been coming along gradually. “You weren’t like this when we were dating!” my mom wails at least once a week. Granted, he did take her to see Monty Python and “School for Wives,” and asked her about the quality of her teeth.
One of his quirks has been around for a while, and this one I told to my friend in Taiwan. My dad likes to play pinball at the dinner table. Literally. He’ll sit there at the head, call everyone’s attention, and then announce that he is about to shoot this rubber band, the one thinly stretched between his pointer finger and thumb, between the coke bottle and orange juice carton, where it will rebound off the pasta bowl and then the saltshaker to land next to my mother’s fork. The more convoluted the route, obviously, the better. After a few tries, he usually succeeds. This only encourages him.
After dinner, he may move on to range shooting. This would be where he stands at the chest-high cabinet between the kitchen and the eating area (only seven feet from it to his chair!) and takes careful rubber band aim at various kitchen knobs, appliances, and groceries. A typical example: “Alana, do you see that cluster of grapes? See the top grape on the right side, leaning right in front of the Keurig? I’m going to hit that grape on its top left corner.” (It’s amazing, actually, that he would allow anything to go flying near his beloved Keurig coffee machine. It was that machine, whose voltage cannot be adapted to Israel’s electric standards, that posed the single greatest obstacle to my parents’ move.) He’s a pretty good shot and will eventually hit his target.
-“Did you see that?!”
-“No.”
-“Well…it was close.”
He has a particular method—product of careful study—of winding the rubber band around his hand and releasing the tension. He shows me how he wraps his ammunition and lets another rubber band go whizzing through the air to land on the floor, loop itself over a handle, or smack a grape into oblivion. “Now,” he tells me in a confidential aside, “there is a precision rifle mode. I use a ruler for that.”
