Studying the Clown Inside the Hero

My father passed away unexpectedly, though he was almost 82, at the beginning of last year.  Because he was a retired high ranking career military office, we will honor him with the full regalia at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. later this month so that family, friends and colleagues can honor him as his due.  

As the daughter of a fighter pilot officer my dad always seemed bigger than life to me.  I can still remember studying everything about him in all kinds of situations as he lived his life to even the very basic mundane tasks such as scrubbing the smooth mentholated Barbasol Shaving Cream onto his face first thing in the morning.  I’d sit on either the commode or edge of the bathtub and watch him carefully glide his Gillette razor across his cheek starting way up near his sideburns, then down and around his mouth to just under his chin.  Back in the days when razor blades were the most common, there was a whole ritual of changing out the blades from unscrewing just below the metal top of the shaver so that the two clasps yawned widely so that the old blade could be discarded to carefully dropping in a new blade and screwing the clasps back shut. Those times that the “razor bit him” he’d either dab it with torn off toilet paper or use the ever mysterious styptic pen that would stop the flow in mid stream.  I remember him watching me watching him from his reflection in the mirror which fascinated me because although his image looked the same, his reflection was just ever so slightly slanted off to one side.  It made me wonder if he saw himself as slanted or if he knew that he was really more handsome in real life! After he completed shaving, the next step was to splash drops of Old Spice into both of his hands from a red glass container patting the fresh smelling elixir all over his face. My reward for having been a patient awestruck witness was to receive a pat on each side of my face from his Old Spiced hands which perfectly covered my cheeks.

Recently the ANC Chaplain contacted me with a request for stories about my Dad which I then sent out family and friends. As expected, there have been many stories about his bravery during his service years and overall just how well-respected he was as a leader. What I like to dust off from my memory banks of my hero-father is the clown that would erupt now and again whether it was through the inflection of his voice, the twinkle of his eye, the complete alteration of his voice into one of several favorite characters or the ever so slight movement of his hand.  

Me and my brothers and certainly any dog we’ve ever owned knew well the art of dad’s subtle humor.  His sparkling eyes would usually give away the pending joke that was sure to follow.  He used to tease us mercilessly with the built up tension from him sitting completely still for what seemed like forever while he jutted his jaw out more and more with each accumulating minute adding a patterned slight movement of his hand which always ended in a raucous fast  movement of either grabbing our knees with his hand and squeezing the tickle out (known as the horse bite) or for the dogs, grabbing their legs or tails so they couldn’t run (thank God we never owned biters!)

As he grew older, dad’s humor only seemed to deepen in its width and breadth.  When my husband and I were newlyweds we had cobbled together hand-me down and make shift furniture which included a sunken-in futon mattress that fit into a wood frame like a folded piece of pita bread which we used as our sofa in the living room.  Late one night as our evening was winding down after watching a long movie, I got up off the futon to turn off the t.v. and noticed a furtive movement in the peripheral vision of my left eye.  Turning quickly, I caught my dad completely embellishing the moment of being stuck in the futon so that his legs could not reach the floor for him to get up. He wiggled both his legs in the air like some kind of a big bug that had found itself stuck inside of a pocket of wet mud totally making fun of himself and laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation that he had found himself in.

Although my mom and dad divorced when I was 10 and my brother was 8, mom still remembers so many moments of great laughter with him least of which was on their wedding night which really helped ease the nervous tension that they both were feeling and sealed her loyalty to him as a true friend in a time of need.  I’m in the process of writing a memoir about my life; the good, the bad, the ugly.  And because my dad, mom, me and my brothers are all brightly colorful people there is a lot of intense feelings in the memories of growing up.  One thing I’m really grateful for remembering now is how much I studied the clown inside of the hero so that even sometimes when that hero falls short in his very human responses to life, there will always be the memory of the sparkle of the clown just raring to emerge out of the shadows if I was only willing to notice him and join in the play.