Thanks, Dad, for useful life skills
Posted
Jun 13 2008, 12:09 PM
by
Donna Freedman
Rating:
Years ago, my dad taught elementary school all day and then went to his second job of teaching adolescents deemed too unruly for regular high school. One evening, a student flipped a penny at him. Dad picked it up and put it in his pocket. The teens laughed, and another one flipped a penny. Then another one.
When my father had 12 cents in his pocket, he said, "Guys, I want to thank you. All I need is 38 more of these and I'm going over to the Fairfield and have a draft beer -- on you."
Not another penny was flung. He could see the horror in their faces: Man, I'm not gonna buy the TEACHER a beer!
As you can see, I come by my coin fascination honestly. But I also learned what he would call a "useful life skill": Sometimes you need to use nontraditional tactics to solve a problem.
In our culture, fathers are stereotyped as the ones who nag about money and responsibility. Check the Father's Day greeting card section and you'll see plenty of references to cash not growing on trees and the need to check one's oil regularly. You'll also read a lot about golf, TV remotes and naps.
My dad, Glendon Fisher, had zero interest in sports and rarely had the time to watch television. However, he may have invented the concept of the power nap, which he called "taking 20." He'd lean back in the recliner, say "Wake me in 20 minutes," and fall instantly to sleep. These brief snatches of shut-eye were a matter of survival, not self-indulgence. My father was and is the hardest-working man I have ever met, except maybe for his own dad -- but even that would be a tie.
The fine art of making do
He and my mother married right after high school and had four kids in five years. Dad worked a variety of jobs -- glass factory, truck driver, electrician in an auto plant -- until he realized that an education would help him build a better future. At age 30 he enrolled in college, the first in his family to do so.
Dad delivered newspapers, went to classes, worked various jobs, and somehow studied and completed his homework in a small house filled to bursting with four clamorous kids. He did well enough to win a fellowship for a master's degree in special education. (During that time he got a grant to create math lesson plans and used some of the money to pay a typist: me, age 12, thrilled to be earning 50 cents a page.)
Summers he either got his old auto factory job back or helped his father, a carpenter, build houses. In his spare time he did tons of improvements on our own home, from plumbing to wiring to remodeling the upstairs. It was years before I realized that most people call a handyman when things go wrong. We had a handyman on staff -- the guy taking 20 in the brown recliner.
Other than those little naps, Dad didn't sit still much. When he did, it was to do schoolwork, pay bills or write budgets on yellow legal tablets, figuring out how much he could give to the shoe store or the dentist that month. At times he devised ways to make a little extra: He built a produce stand for our garden surplus, and for a while took the job of recording police tickets for the township.
Mostly, he made do by making do. Requiring lumber for a project, he got permission to tear down an old house. If he needed an extra set of hands, he traded labor with relatives or friends. When in midlife Dad moved to the site of an old poultry farm, he got rid of the numerous dilapidated chicken houses by advertising "free firewood."
Once he bought a two-story Victorian house for $1. That is not a typo. Still in the habit of attending township meetings, he heard a request by the local bank to build a parking lot on an adjoining property. Dad offered to save them the trouble of tearing down the house on that property by buying it for a buck. He and his father put a new foundation on the site of my childhood home, which had burned down, and then he had the house moved there. My brother and his family moved in.
A chance to rest -- not that he's using it
After the house fire (and the divorce that preceded it), Dad sank what money he had into the chicken farm, an 18-acre parcel with a tumbledown farmhouse and more than its share of trash. (Apparently the previous owner didn't see any reason to pay landfill fees -- he just dumped unwanted stuff out in his woods.) For years Dad worked the two teaching jobs, spent weekends improving the property, and designed a small and extremely energy-efficient house. Eventually he built that house, after tearing down the old one, with help from his father and other relatives.
Much of his acreage is given over to Christmas trees; he plants 1,000 seedlings every year for a nurseryman who comes by every so often to harvest them. Dad also has his own small business, teaching country line dancing.
My father was lucky enough to remarry recently, to a lovely woman named Priscilla who is as thrifty and goal-oriented as he is. Yet neither of them is averse to spending money where it counts: vacations (it's about time!), home improvements and caring for family members. Dad poured a lot of money and time into building a small dwelling on his property for my grandparents, who spent winters in Florida and summers in New Jersey. He found a car for a grandchild who was down on her luck and, when it malfunctioned, gave her rides to work.
A few years ago he visited Seattle when I was at my lowest point financially. Rather than go see the Space Needle, he took me to a warehouse club and treated me to canned goods, sacks of flour, sugar and pinto beans, and 100 postage stamps. He threw in several rolls of duct tape, too.
Dad believes in being prepared. He and Priscilla have a generator, years' worth of firewood cut and stacked, a cellar stocked with canned and dried goods, and a freezer full of foodstuffs bought on sale. (It was during a visit with them that I came up with the phrase "stealth stock-up.") They've put in a vegetable garden, too. If push comes to shove, he says, he can "tell the world to go scratch."
My father taught me a lot, and always by example: how to make do, how to figure your way around a problem if you can't go through it, and, most of all, how not to give up.
Oh, and how to pick up pennies. Some things are just bred in the bone.
