How to Train Your Dad

by Gary Paulsen

  Except this wasn’t Carol’s usual brand of dog food. It was a giant sack of puppy chow, which Dad had found on the markdown shelf at the feed store, owing to a tear in the corner of the bag. The damage had been taped over and the bag looked fine otherwise so it seemed a bargain find of Dad’s that made sense to me. As I’d emptied it into the bin that morning, I’d seen that the dog food company had put a small pamphlet inside the sack.

  It had poured out and was almost completely hidden under the dog food, but I saw the corner of it and grabbed it. Usually those things are just advertisements or coupons for other products they sell, like collars or chew toys. I rarely read or even look at them too carefully and I barely glanced at it as I shoved it in my pocket to recycle later.

  I’d caught a glimpse of the text, though, enough to realize now that fate was nudging me hard, and I pulled it out of my pocket and looked down.

  The pamphlet had a sketch of a puppy on the cover. The print under the picture read:

  TRAINING YOUR PUPPY USING POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT

  See?

  Fate.

  The how part of my dad problem was, literally, in my hands.

  TRAINING YOUR PUPPY

  Positive puppy training is all about rewarding good behavior. And ignoring bad behavior. All training efforts should be subtle and positive; under no circumstance should you yell or scold or angrily rub a puppy’s nose in its mess. So states the first sentences of the pamphlet.

  All right, I know my father isn’t a puppy and that there are some pretty glaring differences between my father and said puppy.

  But are there really?

  My father is a mammal and a puppy is a mammal, and according to science, there are very few differences in the DNA of all mammals.

  In fact, I think I read (or, more likely my dad or Pooder read and then told me as an aside of some long drawn-out story) that there is only supposed to be a seventeen- or eighteen-chromosome difference between humans and lawn grass.

  And I think in some cases—as with Pooder—it might even be a little closer.

  Not that I could use the pamphlet to train lawn grass, although I did read (or, again, Pooder or my dad may have told me) that if you mow down dandelions in your yard, the plant that’s left never grows above the height of the mower blade again. So if a person can train a dandelion to keep its head down and duck underneath a mower, it seems like you could probably train lawn grass. Not to do your taxes or anything like that, but maybe to keep it from coming up through the cracks in the sidewalk—

  Well. Got off on another sidetrack there. Again, sorry, and thanks to Pooder for slowing me down (because if that factory-made-meat-loving thing of his hasn’t rubbed off on me, his propensity for conversational tangents sure has).

  When I told Pooder of my idea—which was to use the puppy training methods to alter my father’s unwanted behaviors—he couldn’t help himself and went off on the humorous point of view rather than appreciating the practical aspect.

  “So if you catch your father chewing one of your shoes, you can use positive reinforcement to make him stop? How about if your father starts chasing cars? What if you catch your father pooping on the rug?”

  “Pooder.”

  “Or if he starts jumping up on people and ruining their clothes—”

  “That’s enough.”

  “Not really. I’ve got a million of them. What about if your father starts humping—”

  “If you don’t stop this instant, I will post the Mountain of Doom video.”

  I was referring to a truly embarrassing (to him) but delightful (to me) video where he was wearing an old army surplus helmet and a too-large moth-eaten flight jacket making engine-revving noises while pretending to be a fighter pilot rescuing the girl held on the mountaintop by the evil villain who happens to be near an airstrip on what you call the Mountain of Doom. He called it “method inventing” and swore it made his ideas more realistic. He had been working on a new video game that he was certain would make him a pile of coin. He didn’t know I had my phone on action video when he did it. The video has been handy. I’ve successfully used it as a threat several times.

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I certainly will.”

  “So”—he tried to be serious, but I could see it was a strain on him—“you’re going to positively reinforce him when he does something wrong and not punish him if he goes poopy on the floor—”

  “Pooder.”

  “Well, that’s how it seems to me. You can’t be serious about this.”

  “This from a guy who quotes Socrates as reason to cozy up to the deranged chef who may or may not routinely stick non-FDA-approved items in the hot grease at a restaurant open to and serving the general public.”

  “Well, who would you quote?”

  “Seriously, if you look at what they’re saying in the pamphlet, it seems like with a little modification the techniques could work.” Hopeful voice, I thought, but it may have been the tone of pleading. And I guess I was. “Like you said before, I can’t run away. I’m too young, plus he’s too good a father for me to do that—I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  “So, positive reinforcement. Got it. What do you do when he does something right?”

  “‘When’?”

  “Well, all right. If. If he does something right?”

  “According to the pamphlet, you praise him.”

  “And if he does something wrong?”

  “Not wrong. Just incorrect. And not if, but when. And that’s a definite—when he does something incorrect. Because he will. This I know.”

  “How will you know to judge what’s right or wrong, sorry, incorrect?”

  “I think it will come to me.”

  “And what do you do then?”

  “According to the pamphlet, you don’t do anything, you ignore it and don’t praise him.”

  “What if that doesn’t work?”

  “I haven’t read the whole pamphlet yet.”

  “I see.” Pooder sighed. “Maybe, since you’re kind of altering a whole human life—sorry, mammalian life—you ought to read the entire instruction booklet before you set about housebreaking your father.”

  “You don’t believe this has the slightest chance of working, do you?”

  “Not a whit.” Another gem from Pooder’s British phase. I was certain he didn’t know what it meant, but he did come up with a nice variety of usable British swear words—bloody and bollocks and bugger and git and sod off were particular favorites.

  “But,” he added, “I’m going to keep an audiovisual journal of your whole experiment to study later. Maybe use it for a documentary. Might be a chance to pick up some coin if I could get it distributed by one of the streaming platforms. Do you think there’s any chance your dad’ll sue?”

  Sometimes Pooder jumping from phase to phase without warning can be a little confusing. He might start things off an English lord before suddenly becoming an advertising mogul looking to make some coin and then turn into a Viking biting deep on a tomato-apple so the juice runs down into his beard-if-he-had-one while he’s thinking of pillaging a coast somewhere. Whenever he goes that way, I lean back until he’s done or at least settles in on just one phase at a time.

  I ignored his latest career path idea, but I did grab an old notebook. He’d made a good point about tracking the success and failure of the experiment; I’d have to take careful notes, see what worked. Luckily, an opportunity to test the training theory on my dad presented itself almost immediately.

  A garage sale.

  THE GARAGE SALE

  As Pooder would be happy to explain, the concept of a “garage sale” is simple and it does not mean anyone’s trying to sell you their garage. What they do, see, is that people who have a lot of junk in their lives that they don’t want any longer drag it out of the basement or attic or closet and put it out on boxes and tables and chairs in front of their homes, or in their open garages, and try to sell it to people who come along
and are suckers enough to pay good money for it.

  My dad would, of course, replace the operable words of junk and suckers with the kinder verbiage of reusables and bargain-hunters.

  We’ve been going to garage sales forever; he likes them only slightly less than he adores Oscar’s yard. He got Pooder hooked, too. I used to like poking around with Dad until I got a little older and his garage-sale finds started to impact my life, and not for the better.

  As we’ve already discussed, he finds value in things that other people don’t quite understand.

  For instance, bib overalls.

  He thinks they are the most practical thing in the world when it comes to apparel. He sees them as comfortable with a lot of handy pockets and made of tough fabric that will last a long time.

  A long time, as far as I can tell at twelve going on thirteen, means “forever.”

  So when he went to a garage sale and found a couple pairs of bib overalls that would fit me, he offered to change the oil in the lady’s leaky car in the driveway for them and brought them home for me to wear. They were like new and well washed and he considered them a major bartering coup and a huge leap forward in the matter of practical clothing for a growing boy.

  “You can wear them every day. You know, for stooging around or dog-puke cleaning up. Good pockets to carry anything you need. Comfortable.”

  Which was all fine and well. Only …

  The bibs had originally belonged to a female. And while it was true they fit me and might be nice for what Dad called “everyday walking-around wear,” they were more of a style statement for a fashion-forward young woman than a utilitarian knockabout piece of clothing for a guy who’s trying to become lookatable material in the good way.

  There were words, cute and flirtatious words such as QUEEN BEE and HOT STUFF, written on patches randomly sewn all over the overalls. Even after I pulled off the patches and washed the bibs, Pooder pointed out that the ink had leached through and permanently stained the denim itself.

  “It would take an enormous amount of personal confidence to wear a pair of pink bib overalls with the words SWEET CHEEKS written across the butt, no matter how faded, even for fishing and drone work in the yard,” he said, obviously sad to agree with me that this particular dad moment was an inarguable fail.

  Did I forget to mention they were pink?

  But my father saw nothing wrong with them. All he could see was that it was a major bartering coup and didn’t I, after all was said and done, need work overalls?

  If only the bib overalls were the beginning and end of my dad’s garage-sale discoveries …

  Every garage sale seems to have one common feature—old videocassette recorders and VHS tapes of movies that were older than dirt. The broken recorders were right in the middle of my father’s wheelhouse when it came to fixing things, and while he felt that general television was pretty awful and nothing on the internet was worth watching, videotapes of movies where the actors had died of old age before I was born were impossible for him to resist.

  He particularly enjoyed murder mystery movies set before DNA was known so the detective had to more or less go by hunches when it came to solving crimes. And any good science-fiction films, according to my dad, were filmed in black and white with cardboard cutouts of the monsters and aliens. My father firmly believed these films were “classics,” like the truck or sump pump, and he could not walk away from them. And, of course, he had to salvage and repair the old video players so these classics could be played.

  Imagine this: me, in a pair of pink bib overalls covered with cutesy faded sayings, like SWEETIE PIE and OH YOU DARLING, and a T-shirt screen-printed with the crooked slogan DALLAS TIRE REPAIR AND WING SHACK (Dad scored an entire box of those because the logo was wonky), wearing a pair of high-top black-and-white-canvas tennis shoes only one size too large (“you’ll grow into them soon enough”) and a large straw hat with a green visor on the front edge held on by a chin strap made of frayed orange baler twine, toting several boxes of VHS tapes and a couple video machines back to the truck, while my dad changed out the storm windows on the back porch in an even trade.

  Oh, how I came to hate garage sales once the idea of becoming lookatable to Peg was on my mind.

  But it was at one of the weekly garage sales Dad dragged me to that fate—remember fate?—once again kicked in and set up the first real test of my positive-reinforcement father-training experiment.

  We were on our way back from town, just the three of us sitting across the seat in the truck, Dad, Carol, and me. Carol loved to go to town, to ride in the truck and stare intensely out the front as we drive—my father says she’s cataloging potential prey items, looking for any possible security threats to what’s hers. Her favorite moments are when she spies a garage sale.

  The reason Carol gets so excited is that my father becomes a predator when he spots a garage sale and she reacts to it, enters into the pack mentality, triggers on my dad’s right eye, where dogs always look for human emotions. (True fact, which I learned from Pooder. Check it out on your dog if you’ve got one. If you don’t, go get one. Pooder says nobody can live completely without a dog in their life even though his father won’t let him have one. Get a rescue dog and you’ll save more than only the dog. You’ll save yourself. Pooder says so and he’s only wrong twenty-six and a half percent of the time. Good odds.)

  The prey—card tables stacked with stuff—sit waiting in summer heat.

  We drive carefully past to see what sort of sale it is.

  “Don’t give away that we’re interested,” my father says like always, and Carol picks up on his warning, watching the sale like a cheetah looking at a herd of antelope, no direct eye contact, careful study-but-not-study as we drive past.

  The rules of the hunt are simple.

  Look, but don’t let them see we’re looking.

  No buying sight unseen—this after the time we stopped at one sale with a stack of sealed cardboard boxes and Dad was too curious not to get out and make an offer then and there because someone else was eyeing the boxes and his predator instinct got the best of him. Only to find out when we opened the box at home that it was stinky and moldy whipped-cream and cottage-cheese and sour-cream containers, which was not only a disgusting bummer in the moment, but forever put us off dairy.

  Think practical. The correct procedure was to look for gently broken tools he could fix or good used kitchen utensils, work boots that might almost fit, and any quality athletic or leisure gear that might be a bargain. The everyday necessities that other people buy at shopping malls with their hard-earned ertogs. (We once almost got a two-person kayak, but were outbid by some guy who was willing to pay cash, and not just clean the garage-sale guy’s gutters.)

  Give potential purchases a careful inspection. Another time we thought we had scored on a recliner that seemed perfect. Not until we got it home did we discover that we had also purchased a family of rats that had built a nest in the springs under the seat cushion—a reeking collection of cotton upholstery stuffing, sticks, grass, and, judging by the smell, urine to glue it all together. Since rats make more rats, at a frighteningly speedy rate, Dad says, and he is a live-and-let-live kind of guy, we dragged the chair back outside and let them keep it.

  During today’s initial drive-by of the potential garage sale, I was thinking about that chair and its family of rats and how Dad never really paid any attention to his own garage-sale rules. That’s when I decided it was time to apply a technique I’d picked up from the puppy-training pamphlet.

  The basic idea seemed simple: ignore bad behavior and praise good behavior.

  Since the “dog” (who I began referring to as “SP” for Subject Puppy because Pooder said it would sound more experimental and official that way when I wrote down accounts of my training efforts in my notebook at night) was starting to do something inappropriate, I practiced ignoring SP and his bad behavior.

  I didn’t want to let SP think I was interested in what SP might be
doing and thereby call attention to SP.

  SPs crave attention.

  I quickly discovered that it’s a little hard to ignore something your SP and killer dog are staring-but-not-staring at, as you’re casually driving back and forth in front of someone’s house, trying to study-not-study the items in the driveway, especially when SP is busy driving the truck that’s carrying you.

  But I tried.

  I pretended to nonchalantly look out the opposite side window of the truck, away from the prey object/potential garage-sale stop, and tried to appear wildly interested in a bird that was flying overhead.

  Carol fell for it and looked where I was pointing. When she realized it was an ordinary, boring bird and that I’d diverted her attention away from Dad’s garage-sale hunt for nothing, she looked deep into my eyes—I got the distinct impression she knew exactly what I was doing and did not approve—and then went back to her job of studying-not-studying the sale with my dad.

  SP didn’t even glance up at the bird. As we drove past, I could see him fixate on a beat-up rusty rowing machine. Then he shook his head and muttered to himself, “Nah.”

  We picked up speed and I thought we were free and clear. It seemed a perfect moment for some positive reinforcement. “Good thinking,” I said. (I almost said, “Good boy.”) “Didn’t seem like there was much of anything there.”

  SP didn’t respond, and as we made a series of left turns to swing past the garage sale again, I understood that he wasn’t giving up so easily. As we passed by a second time, he perked up. “I think I see an electric hedge trimmer we might be able to make use of.”

  He then drove around the block again, pulled up to the curb in front of the sale, and went directly to the trimmer, which he bargained down to two dollars, and bought. (SP barters if the amount is over ten bucks, but anything under five and he pays cash, a crumpled single and spare change in this case.) Considering that we didn’t have anything that even remotely resembled a hedge or any other kind of topiary achievement except the four scrawny trees, it seemed a waste of two dollars.