I loved my old man, to use a phrase he taught me, this side idolatry. I inherited his sense of humor, so he introduced me to Gore Vidal’s critical essays, H. Allen Smith, John D. MacDonald, MAD Magazine, and Gilbert Shelton (the Wonder Wart Hog comics in the back of his motorcycle magazines). His extensive paperback library led me to love science fiction and fantasy. (Although he was dubious about my eventually teenage discovery of fandom: “I used to hang out with those guys in the Village clubs, before you were born. But they weren’t as friendly as the bikers, or as well-read as the jazz fans. In fact, some of them weren’t as literate as the bikers, and were even ruder than the jazzmen!”)
He told me that my sister might be the pretty one, but I was the smart one, and smart was better than pretty — and he demonstrated that he meant it, too. (After he died, my sister and I compared notes and discovered he’d said exactly the same thing to her.) He taught me that it was always wise to be skeptical, but that being only skeptical was also a trap. And despite his parental failures (which were many), he gave his kids another great gift by letting us know that it wasn’t our fault — neither he nor our mother were very good at parenting, was all.
And he also taught me “Remember, this’ll make a great story someday.”
Nicole Cliffe’s tweet-stream today got a lot of deserved attention…
My dad thought HIS dad was dead until I was a year old. Then he found him in the Toronto phone book.
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) June 19, 2016
"Doesn't your mom lie about everything, all the time?"
"Yeah."
(opens phone book for Canada's most populous city: boom, there he is)
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) June 19, 2016
So, my dad calls his dad and is like "uh, are you the Ralph Cliffe who was married to Horrible Mother?"
(He was.)
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) June 19, 2016
And he said "listen, no human being who had the ability to get away from my mother would have passed it up. I have no hard feelings."
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) June 19, 2016
… and it gets wilder from there, finally ending with one of the great punch lines of our era. By all means, read the whole thing (you don’t need to sign up to read Twitter). If reading bottom-to-top is too challenging, click on the blue ‘View conversation’ link, and you’ll get a pop-up showing the whole series start-to-finish.
Sunday Night Open Thread: Happy “Relationship: It’s Complicated” Father’s Day…Post + Comments (177)