10 Lessons I Learned from my Dad
I grew up in the 90s, when the family sitcom was having its heyday. Full House, Family Matters, Boy Meets World – what they all had in common is that underlying the characters’ zany antics was some kind of moral lesson, the sometimes slapstick humor belying their true allegorical nature. No matter how silly the episode, no matter how many times Steve Urkel hiked up his suspendered pants and delivered a nasally “did I do that?” or Stephanie deadpanned her signature “how rude!”, inevitably the episode would end with a tender moment and a lesson learned. These moral messages were typically delivered by the father figures, by the Carl Winslows and Danny Tanners and Tim “The Tool Man” Taylors and the Mr. Feeneys. As the episode drew to a close, the canned laughter would be momentarily suspended, the music taking on a decidedly more serious tenor as the sage male character imparted his words of wisdom on his young charges.
In many respects, my own dad, James (Jim), was something of a 90s sitcom dad. Just like the TV dads, at first blush he was serious, going off to his corporate job each day in a freshly dry cleaned suit and tie and leather briefcase. But beneath that polished and professional surface was someone who liked to tell head-shakingly cheesy jokes and pour the crushed remnants of a potato chip bag directly into his mouth, someone who belched loudly and quoted the most annoying catchphrases from TV commercials (“Uh oh, better call Maaco,” “It’s time to make the donuts,” "a tie, thanks," and “Mamma Mia, that’s a spicy meatball” were a few of his favorites). And above all, just like those 90s sitcom dads, my dad always seemed to have a lesson to impart. No, they weren’t necessarily given in the typical sitcom style with heartwarming background music and a live audience to say “aww” in unison; instead, they were lessons given over time through what he said and did, and how he lived his life.
Here, on the two year anniversary of his passing, are just a few of the many life lessons I learned from my dad:
1. It’s better to be overdressed than underdressed.
This was something I heard him say time and time again over the years. As I was coming into my young adulthood and having to attend grown-up events for the first time (job interviews, awards ceremonies, leadership conferences, and the like), I’d often wonder aloud what I should wear. And he’d always say the same thing: “It’s better to be overdressed than underdressed.” To this day, when I’m standing in my closet, unsure about the dress code for the place I’m going or the event I’m going to, I think of his words, and they haven’t failed me yet. There are few things more uncomfortable than being the only person wearing jeans in a room full of dress pants or looking down during an interview and realizing you’re wearing the wrong thing.
This was advice he lived on a daily basis, too. At some point in the later 90s, when corporate America was making the shift from professional business attire to the trendy “business casual,” my dad was probably one of the only people to dislike this transition. Throughout his career, he’d taken pride in arriving at the office each day in his freshly pressed suit and a tie carefully chosen from his ever-growing collection, which hung neatly on an electronic tie carousel in his closet. It was only with some reluctance that he traded in his traditional work wardrobe for khakis and sweaters.
My dad was quite predictable when it came to his dress. If it was a winter holiday, you could count on him to be wearing corduroys and a sweater worn over a tucked-in plaid button-down. For a more casual event in the summer, it was khaki cargo shorts and a tucked-in polo shirt and his trusty white New Balance sneakers. When warm summer days turned into cool summer evenings, he’d top that ensemble with a sunbleached Cape Cod sweatshirt. If he found a shirt he liked, he’d own it in every color.
2. Be proud of where you came from.
Anyone who has spent more than five minutes talking to my dad, regardless of the context of the conversation, has probably learned that he hails from Fraser, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Though he was born in Connecticut and moved back here with his family just in time for his senior year of high school, and though he called Connecticut home for the entirety of his adult life, there was always a large part of his heart devoted to his beloved midwestern hometown, and without fail, this fact would always make its way into his conversations.
My dad always spoke fondly of those formative years spent in Fraser – being involved in Boy Scouts and baseball, playing outside with friends until the street lights came on, eating fried bologna sandwiches, having a paper route. Though his childhood wasn’t perfect, he had a deep sense of nostalgia for the good old days back in his hometown in the 50s and 60s, and as I was growing up, the stories he’d tell me about his childhood conjured images of Leave it to Beaver and The Wonder Years.
As an adult, Michigan would often call to him, an invisible tether tying him to this place that held so many memories for him. Nearly every year, he’d make the daylong drive out from Connecticut and stay with old friends so he could attend the annual Fraser High School alumni picnic. Despite the distance, those friends he’d grown up with in baseball and scouting remained lifelong friends, and he nurtured those connections, believing there are few people in life who know you better than those you grew up with.
3. Go outside.
At the height of my angsty preteen years, practically everything I enjoyed doing happened indoors – talking on the phone (back then it was a landline), writing story after story in spiral-bound notebooks, using the computer, watching TV, reading a book. On hot summer days when all I wanted to do was lounge on the couch reading a Judy Blume book or watching a Bug Juice marathon, my dad would instead insist that I get outside. “It’s way too nice a day to be in here,” he’d say, a refrain I often find myself saying to my own kids, because don’t we all eventually grow up to become our parents?
If it was a nice day, and sometimes even if it wasn’t, my dad could be found outside. He liked working out in the garden, tending to vegetable plants and his prized hydrangea bushes. After he retired, he, along with my grandfather and some other friends, formed a hiking group who affectionately and perhaps self-deprecatingly called themselves “The Geezers,” and together they explored hiking trails all over southern New England. And in the spaces between the hiking and gardening, he liked to go down to Rocky Hill’s Ferry Park, where he’d drink his $1 McDonald’s coffee and watch the ferry traverse the Connecticut river, transporting its passengers.
4. Embrace tradition.
I’ve known very few people who have clung to their traditions more fervently than my dad did. For my entire childhood, we’d spend a week or more on Cape Cod each summer, always returning to the same cottage on Cora Lane in Harwichport. Inevitably, our vacation would have to include the same list of activities: a round of mini-golf at Pirate’s Cove, ice cream at Emack & Bolio’s, a fried seafood platter at Cooke’s, a tour of the Cape Cod Potato Chip Factory, an Orleans Firebirds game, and a visit to the wooden playground at Orleans Elementary School. If we failed to do one of these things during the course of our vacation, the week felt incomplete somehow.
Holidays, too, had their own traditions. Every Christmas morning had to be videotaped with the old camcorder (which has provided us precious relics I’m now happy to have), and in the background of each year’s tape is the same predictable soundtracks: the Christmas albums of Amy Grant and the Beach Boys, and the soundtrack for Tchichovsky’s The Nutcracker. Every Thanksgiving, he’d insist on the same menu, including his favorite creamed onion side dish, and he always had to be the one to carve the turkey.
While his reluctance to try new things or diverge from the known and well-worn path was sometimes frustrating, I’ve come to appreciate his love of tradition. In raising my own kids, I’ve realized how important it is to have those touchstones in life, those beloved places and things that you look forward to coming back to time and time again. I’ve even kept some of his favorite traditions alive, although I have to draw the line at creamed onions.
5. Have an eclectic taste in music.
There are few gifts my dad gave me that I appreciate more than the love of music. While he wasn’t much of a musician himself, music was a way of life for him, and he appreciated the full breadth and depth of what the musical world had to offer. By the time I was born, he had amassed a huge record collection, and throughout my childhood, he built an almost equally large collection of CDs. In turn, I have not only grown up to have an almost equally eclectic taste in music myself (though thankfully my own collection exists on Spotify and not in cabinets and closets), but have also become the kind of person you want on your team for trivia when a question comes up about nearly any type of music. Thanks, Dad. You never know when that knowledge might be needed.
Music was always playing in our house, and the range of what he’d listen to, both in terms of genre and time period, was staggering. He would regularly listen to everything from folk, to Motown, to jazz, to classical, to musical theater. But I think it’s safe to say that his true love was the rock and roll and singer-songwriter music of his young adulthood, and he especially loved the music of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton/Cream, The Moody Blues, Simon & Garfunkel, and Bob Dylan, among so many others. However, where he was very traditional in some ways, this didn’t necessarily hold true with his love of music – over the years, he continued to discover and appreciate new artists and genres, even some of the stuff that my siblings and I liked to listen to.
He especially loved live music. He was lucky enough to see The Beatles in concert as a teenager. When he was 20, he went to Woodstock (“only for the music,” he’d always insist to us when we were kids, “not for the drugs”), and he prized his Woodstock ticket so much he kept it in a fireproof locked box. When my brother was playing in a local band, my dad was one of their number one groupies, going to every one of their shows and bobbing his head appreciatively for every song. I don’t think there are many things that brought him more joy than music, and I am grateful to him for passing that love and appreciation down to me.
6. Retire as early as you can.
In the early 2000s, when the corporate world was doling out “Golden Handshakes” in an effort to usher out the older generation and bring in MBAs they could pay less, my dad decided to take the deal and retire at only 54. I was a sophomore in college at the time, and didn’t realize at the time just how young 54 actually is in the grand scheme of things.
My dad had always been something of a workaholic, spending long days at the office and flying out frequently for business trips. It was difficult for me to fathom how this man would acclimate to retired life, and I imagined that he’d be right back out looking for a job within a few weeks. But he proved me wrong, adjusting better to retired life than any of us could have imagined – too well, some might even argue. Before long, he’d found a new groove at home, making his daily loop to McDonald’s to get his coffee and to the post office, sitting on the deck with a book or in his recliner watching the same five news stories on an endless loop on MSNBC, and even sometimes making dinner (though it tended to be the same few things ad infinitum – breaded pork chops with rice pilaf was an old standby).
In retrospect, I’m glad that my dad was able to retire when he did, knowing now that he’d only live to age 70. It gave him plenty of years to enjoy life at a slower pace, reading books and listening to music and going on hikes, things his working life had afforded him less time to do. And more than anything, his early retirement meant that he was able to spend a lot of time with his grandchildren. When my oldest two kids were only 1 and 3, I not only went back to work full time as a teacher but also enrolled in a graduate (Sixth Year) program at UConn, which meant that I needed a lot of help with the kids. My dad was a lifesaver during those years, shuttling the kids to preschool and activities, bringing them home when I was at class. He had his own traditions with them, bringing them for pancakes at Chip’s or for Happy Meals at McDonalds, and in those years he probably knew their teachers and classmates better than I did. Although the kids were young when he died, they’ll have an everlasting memory of him because he spent so much time with them during those years.
7. Be frugal.
I have a distinct memory of being in a sociology class in college, an infographic projected on the whiteboard at the front of the room showing various income levels and how they translated in the modern American socioeconomic class system. I remember calculating our family’s household income and discovering with great surprise that we fell into a higher income bracket than I’d ever realized as I was growing up.
The reason for my great surprise is that we lived like we did not have much money. We lived comfortably, of course, and I am grateful that my basic needs were always met in my childhood, that I never knew hunger or want. But we did not live extravagantly. Our vacations were generally only places that could be reached in the family car. My dad believed in driving the same car until it died of natural causes. My mom clipped coupons and bought store brand everything. We didn’t go out to eat very often. My dad was a meticulous budgeter, and I remember him sitting at the computer for hours, plugging every purchase into Quicken, printing out pie charts showing how much spending was happening in various categories.
My dad’s extreme frugality was another gift he gave to me. Because of it, my parents were able to help me pay for my undergraduate years of college. They also helped significantly with the cost of my wedding. I’ll never forget the day we went to the wedding venue to make the final payment. We were sitting in the business office, and my dad took out his checkbook. He was visibly pale and sweaty, writing out the check at an almost comically slow speed, mentioning aloud several times that it was one of the biggest checks he’d ever written. Spending money was physically painful for him, as evidenced by the fact that he looked like he might need medical attention as he was writing out that check. If only I had inherited *that* characteristic from him!
8. Place a high value on education.
In studying to be a literacy specialist, I learned that the number of books in a child’s home is one of the greatest predictors of academic success. I was fortunate to grow up in a home where books lined the shelves, and seeing books in the hands of my parents surely influenced my own love of reading. We spent a lot of time in libraries and bookstores, and were encouraged to cultivate our own book collections on the shelves of our bedrooms.
My dad was what I’ve come to understand as an “early adopter” of technology. We had a CD player when most households were still listening to cassettes or records, a DVD player when most households were still watching VHS tapes, and maybe most importantly, a cutting-edge Macintosh computer when most households had MS-DOS. That Macintosh computer, as well as its successors, became a central hub for learning in our home. We were never allowed to have a video game system, and I spent years being upset about the fact that Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog were things that could exist only at my friends’ houses. But in their stead, we had educational games that would foster our learning – Word Munchers, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, Sim City, Museum Madness, and so many more.
My dad studied at UConn, but life circumstances forced him to withdraw and enter the workforce before he’d earned enough credits for a degree. This was a fact that he’d always lamented, and so in turn he encouraged me to prioritize my education above all else so that I could get into college and complete a degree.
9. Be a loyal fan.
My dad was a longtime Red Sox fan, which in and of itself is a lesson in loyalty. For many years, loving the Red Sox was synonymous with disappointment, but my dad never wavered in his support of his beloved team, and was finally rewarded for his patience in 2004 when his Sox won the World Series. To me, one of the most comforting sounds is the background hum of a baseball game on TV: the crack of the bat, the booming voice of the announcer, the din of the crowd, the cheerful pipe organ renditions of “take me out to the ballgame." I will forever associate these sounds with him, accompanied by the memories of him sitting on the couch, cheering “yes!” at the screen with each homerun, pacing anxiously in front of the TV when things took a tense turn, even leaving the room at times as if his presence was affecting the outcome of the game.
His loyal fandom extended beyond sports. He was also a loyal fan of the important people in his life, especially his kids and grandkids. When my siblings and I were in middle and high school, he’d always make a point to come to all of our performances – our musicals and talent shows, marching band competitions and choir concerts, cheering us on from the front row. Equally, watching his grandkids play tee-ball and compete in the Pinewood Derby brought him a lot of joy.
In his retirement, my dad loved Facebook as a way of staying connected to people. Whenever anyone made a post sharing exciting news, you could count on him to be one of the first people to comment with a congratulatory message, his way of being a loyal fan in the digital age. He had a way of making people feel like he was genuinely excited for their successes, like he was celebrating alongside you.
10. Don’t take life too seriously.
Before I ever knew “Dad jokes” were a thing, I knew that my dad was the king of cheesy jokes. Among his favorites were “you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose,” “it’s na-cho cheese, it’s my cheese,” and “who is this Justin Case guy, anyway?” His jokes were more likely to make us groan than to make us laugh, but that's par for the course when it comes to dad humor.
My dad had a great appreciation for comedy. He loved Saturday Night Live, especially from the era of Dan Akroyd, Gilda Radner, and Chevy Chase. One of his all-time favorite movies was Christmas Vacation, and no matter how many times he watched it, the antics of Clark Griswold and Cousin Eddie would always get a laugh out of him. He especially loved the comedic stylings of Steve Martin, and some of our favorite movies to watch together were Father of the Bride parts 1 and 2.
Although he was sometimes quite serious and cerebral, it was always balanced by his sense of humor. He had a dry wit and was a master of sarcasm, both of which I like to think I inherited from him.
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