Dear M,
This week I'm going to do a side-step and delve into the depths of my mind for a bit of self-analysis of the effects of my father's actions on my psyche. Anyone who has read our blog may ask: "how is that any different from the whining on about your father you've been doing in past blogs?"Well, for one thing, this week I will let you know why I've spent 30 years working at a thankless job in an industry that is dead on the vine. I blame my father (that's nothing new).
The year I got busted twice for drugs at school, my father announced that we were moving to California. I had an Aunt and Uncle who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and we had visited them a few years back on vacation. Dad had been in contact with them and was in the negotiation stage of buying a deli in the same town where they lived. He even flew out there and made an offer, which the man accepted. I always got the feeling that the reason we moved 1500 miles away from all that we had known was to get me away from the bad lot I had fallen in with. If that was the reason, it proved to be another poor decision in a long line of bad decisions from my father. I will detail in later blogs how I followed in his bad-decision footsteps once we got to California. For now, I will chronicle his experimentation with entrepreneurship that I partially blame for his death.
Before we moved to California, he owned two gas stations; one of which was a truck-stop and very successful. It was on a busy highway that offered up a steady stream of big-rigs 24 hours a day - 7 days a week. I was very young, so I didn't recognize the signs of exorbitant stress that made him sell the station to one of his best friends. I do remember him being called to the station in the middle of the night when someone didn't show up for their shift or when it was robbed. He then bought a less involved gas station on the exact opposite side of the highway. It wasn't open 24 hours, but was still profitable enough to support a family and a home with a lot of acreage - that is until a bypass went in and killed both stations.
My father was smart enough to see the writing on the wall when construction on the bypass started and sold it so that he could move his family to California. Unfortunately, he didn't quite get enough for the station or the homestead, and since he had nothing in writing, (bad decision time), the man with the deli sold it to his best friend instead. Dad then went in on an ill-advised partnership in a print shop that fell flat on its face.
So there we were: 1500 miles from home and not a dime left in the family bank. Dad took several jobs, but never held one for more than a few months. We moved all over the area; never living more than a year in the same house. It was very hard on my father. He drank liquid antacid like it was water. I added to the stress by finding a new group of bad influences. Ulcers and stomach cancer eventually took his life, after a few more failed business attempts.
I saw how the stress of owning his own business zapped the very life out of my father and I swore that I would never go down that road. I've cast out every thought of entrepreneurship like it was an evil sin. It has worked out well for us until the last ten years or so. The industry I work in is being absorbed by the internet and I could lose my job at any time. My salary has gone stale and my company finds new ways to add more pressure everyday. I'm beginning to understand the stress to provide for his family that my father lived under all those years. It must have been hell.
Maybe the lesson here is that there is no sure thing in this life except for death and taxes. Stress is a part of life as much as joy and happiness. I might have done just fine had I listened to my wife and opened a coffee shop/library as was her dream. It certainly would have given me a place to sell our books. ;)
Dear DB,
Yes, a bookshop is a lovely idea in theory, but not necessarily in practice. I speak from experience, and I'll tell you about my short-lived and spectacularly unsuccessful experience of being a bookshop-owner some other time.
I guess when it comes to our parents we either mimic their behaviour or react against it. Your post got me remembering what meals were like round our family table when I was little. Such traumatic occasions they were, for there was in place a strict commandment: “Thou shalt not rise from this table till every last morsel of food has been consumed from your plate.”
This might not have been so bad if dear Polly had known how to cook. But Polly spent her time with a head in a book and to say her culinary abilities were indifferent is to put it mildly.
Certain dishes stand out in memory. There was that liver and pineaple thing atop lumpy mashed potatoes, swimming in a hideous watery gravy from a packet, for example. But that wasn’t the worst of them. Ironically it was from pudding that we had the most to fear.
“What’s for pudding?” was a question asked in tones of dread. It was usually one of a rotation of four, and only one of them could be consumed without having to fight down the desire to retch.
Everyone’s favourite, if it can be called that, because no-one wanted to retch during or afterwards, was something called “instant pudding.” It came out of a packet and got whisked with milk and not even Polly could mess that up.
After instant pudding things went went rapidly downhill. An unbridgeable chasm away was rice pudding. This might sound nice, but in Polly’s hands rice pudding turned into something lumpy and indigestible with a thick, slimy and exceedingly disgusting skin on the top.
Even worse than rice pudding was the pudding where the slippery and disgusting texture extended all the way down, right from the thick skin on top, to the very last must-be-eaten-before-you-can-leave-the-table spoonful. This was something called sago, and it looked a bit like frog sperm with a crust, although frog sperm with a crust doubtless tastes better.
The all time favourite, the deserving winner of Most Revolting Pudding of All Time, the one that makes me shudder to this day, was prunes and custard. I still can’t look at a prune without feeling nauseous.
Every meal was a battlefield of course, with my older brother and Roderick locked in a dreadful contest of wills. Roderick usually won, but at great cost. My brother left home the very day he was legally entitled to do, at the tender age of sixteen. And the lasting consequence was to turn him into the fussiest eater I know.
In my case the reaction was different. I didn’t turn out a fussy eater, but I did make a conscious decision never to force my own son to eat anything he didn’t want to. But there was a more radical reaction to these early impressions of domestic bliss, and that was the half-conscious, half-unconscious decision never inflict a father upon my children. And so I married not…
This week I'm going to do a side-step and delve into the depths of my mind for a bit of self-analysis of the effects of my father's actions on my psyche. Anyone who has read our blog may ask: "how is that any different from the whining on about your father you've been doing in past blogs?"Well, for one thing, this week I will let you know why I've spent 30 years working at a thankless job in an industry that is dead on the vine. I blame my father (that's nothing new).
The year I got busted twice for drugs at school, my father announced that we were moving to California. I had an Aunt and Uncle who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and we had visited them a few years back on vacation. Dad had been in contact with them and was in the negotiation stage of buying a deli in the same town where they lived. He even flew out there and made an offer, which the man accepted. I always got the feeling that the reason we moved 1500 miles away from all that we had known was to get me away from the bad lot I had fallen in with. If that was the reason, it proved to be another poor decision in a long line of bad decisions from my father. I will detail in later blogs how I followed in his bad-decision footsteps once we got to California. For now, I will chronicle his experimentation with entrepreneurship that I partially blame for his death.
Before we moved to California, he owned two gas stations; one of which was a truck-stop and very successful. It was on a busy highway that offered up a steady stream of big-rigs 24 hours a day - 7 days a week. I was very young, so I didn't recognize the signs of exorbitant stress that made him sell the station to one of his best friends. I do remember him being called to the station in the middle of the night when someone didn't show up for their shift or when it was robbed. He then bought a less involved gas station on the exact opposite side of the highway. It wasn't open 24 hours, but was still profitable enough to support a family and a home with a lot of acreage - that is until a bypass went in and killed both stations.
My father was smart enough to see the writing on the wall when construction on the bypass started and sold it so that he could move his family to California. Unfortunately, he didn't quite get enough for the station or the homestead, and since he had nothing in writing, (bad decision time), the man with the deli sold it to his best friend instead. Dad then went in on an ill-advised partnership in a print shop that fell flat on its face.
So there we were: 1500 miles from home and not a dime left in the family bank. Dad took several jobs, but never held one for more than a few months. We moved all over the area; never living more than a year in the same house. It was very hard on my father. He drank liquid antacid like it was water. I added to the stress by finding a new group of bad influences. Ulcers and stomach cancer eventually took his life, after a few more failed business attempts.
I saw how the stress of owning his own business zapped the very life out of my father and I swore that I would never go down that road. I've cast out every thought of entrepreneurship like it was an evil sin. It has worked out well for us until the last ten years or so. The industry I work in is being absorbed by the internet and I could lose my job at any time. My salary has gone stale and my company finds new ways to add more pressure everyday. I'm beginning to understand the stress to provide for his family that my father lived under all those years. It must have been hell.
Maybe the lesson here is that there is no sure thing in this life except for death and taxes. Stress is a part of life as much as joy and happiness. I might have done just fine had I listened to my wife and opened a coffee shop/library as was her dream. It certainly would have given me a place to sell our books. ;)
Dear DB,
Yes, a bookshop is a lovely idea in theory, but not necessarily in practice. I speak from experience, and I'll tell you about my short-lived and spectacularly unsuccessful experience of being a bookshop-owner some other time.
I guess when it comes to our parents we either mimic their behaviour or react against it. Your post got me remembering what meals were like round our family table when I was little. Such traumatic occasions they were, for there was in place a strict commandment: “Thou shalt not rise from this table till every last morsel of food has been consumed from your plate.”
This might not have been so bad if dear Polly had known how to cook. But Polly spent her time with a head in a book and to say her culinary abilities were indifferent is to put it mildly.
Certain dishes stand out in memory. There was that liver and pineaple thing atop lumpy mashed potatoes, swimming in a hideous watery gravy from a packet, for example. But that wasn’t the worst of them. Ironically it was from pudding that we had the most to fear.
“What’s for pudding?” was a question asked in tones of dread. It was usually one of a rotation of four, and only one of them could be consumed without having to fight down the desire to retch.
Everyone’s favourite, if it can be called that, because no-one wanted to retch during or afterwards, was something called “instant pudding.” It came out of a packet and got whisked with milk and not even Polly could mess that up.
After instant pudding things went went rapidly downhill. An unbridgeable chasm away was rice pudding. This might sound nice, but in Polly’s hands rice pudding turned into something lumpy and indigestible with a thick, slimy and exceedingly disgusting skin on the top.
Even worse than rice pudding was the pudding where the slippery and disgusting texture extended all the way down, right from the thick skin on top, to the very last must-be-eaten-before-you-can-leave-the-table spoonful. This was something called sago, and it looked a bit like frog sperm with a crust, although frog sperm with a crust doubtless tastes better.
The all time favourite, the deserving winner of Most Revolting Pudding of All Time, the one that makes me shudder to this day, was prunes and custard. I still can’t look at a prune without feeling nauseous.
Every meal was a battlefield of course, with my older brother and Roderick locked in a dreadful contest of wills. Roderick usually won, but at great cost. My brother left home the very day he was legally entitled to do, at the tender age of sixteen. And the lasting consequence was to turn him into the fussiest eater I know.
In my case the reaction was different. I didn’t turn out a fussy eater, but I did make a conscious decision never to force my own son to eat anything he didn’t want to. But there was a more radical reaction to these early impressions of domestic bliss, and that was the half-conscious, half-unconscious decision never inflict a father upon my children. And so I married not…