Tales from the Dad Side

by Steve Doocy

  But we didn’t know whether to tell her about the incident on the way to the airport or to just let her discover it on her own once she got there. She must have known something was up preflight because her brother and sister uncharacteristically burst into tears when they said good-bye, and all of our friends made urgent phone calls—“Are you going to let her go?”—which led to private conversations behind closed doors so that somebody who might be flying that day would not get as freaked out as her parents.

  As we drove to the airport we did not listen to news radio because we didn’t want her to hear one of the news bulletins. Instead we listened to Dr. Laura tell some woman who was stuck in a dead-end marriage to leave the womanizing bum to whom she was hitched.

  “This is the hill you want to die on?” Dr. Laura lectured some call-in loser on XM.

  I didn’t want to think about hills or dying so I changed the channel and we listened to some guy in a monotone tell us that we should liquidate our 401(k) and invest in pork bellies.

  At the gate Mary, who by that time knew about the terrorist attack, was a picture of maturity. When it was time to say good-bye, she put on her brave face and then walked through security backward so she could see us every step of the way until a partition got in our way, and she was gone. I was trusting the guys with the Uzis would keep her safe between our house and the land of Quidditch.

  Wondering whether we’d made the right decision to send her, my wife and I spoke not a word on the way home, instead listening to the news on the radio of the attack, and how they’d gotten some leads and were about to launch a series of raids to head off another attack. I had an uneasy feeling about letting her go. It was the right thing for her…wasn’t it? When my wife and I got home, I went to the airline website and punched in her flight number. As I waited for that screen to load on that day of international airport terror, I was instantly scared to death.

  Call the airline.

  That was the same online notation for the planes that crashed on 9/11. I dialed her cell phone, and got nothing, not even her voice mail message. I found another flight tracker, identical message.

  Call the airline.

  Why couldn’t she have gone to summer camp in the Berkshires, where the only worry was about flies the size of canned hams? I picked up the cordless and dialed the 800 number for the airline.

  “Due to an unusually high call volume, your call will be answered by the next operator in approximately twenty-three minutes.”

  Twenty-three minutes? Why was the airline switchboard suddenly jammed at nine o’clock on a Sunday? BECAUSE SOMETHING BAD WAS HAPPENING, AND I WASN’T THERE TO PROTECT MY DAUGHTER!

  Tempted to hang up and call another number, I knew I’d just lose my place in line, so with speakerphone on, I went fishing on the Web, where panicked parents can become hyperspeed typists. Five other flight trackers all issued the same disturbing notation, but after I was eighteen minutes on hold, I was back at her airline site and got a suddenly different notation: Taxiing for takeoff.

  What changed from Call the Airline to Taxiing for takeoff? It didn’t matter. I sat at the computer clicking—REFRESH—every fifteen seconds, as it gave me a virtual real-time status report; Taxiing for takeoff. Altitude, 0 feet. Altitude, 0 feet. Altitude, 0 feet. Altitude, 50 feet. I held my breath, watching to make sure the numbers went up and not down. Altitude, 120 feet. I continued until her flight was cruising 35,000 feet away from anything the plane could run into, like buildings, mountains, or icebergs.

  At bedtime I replayed the ritual of going to her room and sitting on her bed, but this time I didn’t feel sad; I felt very alone. This was what it would be like when she and her brother and her little sister all moved away. It would be painfully quiet. I sat there and wondered if she was frightened, or if she even knew what was happening on the ground in the United Kingdom. I stared at a third-grade Halloween costume photograph of Mary dressed as Mary Queen of Hearts. Things used to be so simple.

  As dads we try not to show when we’re scared or worried, but truth be told, the most frightening times are when we have no control over what’s happening. When the kids are somewhere we can’t see them, or talk to them, or squeeze them, we have to hope and pray that they are safe, and that if something comes up, they’ll be wise enough to improvise. Twelve hours after Call the airline, our phone rang.

  “Hi, Dad!”

  “Hi, Mary. You took off late….”

  “We did? Didn’t notice. Daddy, it’s real pretty here today,” and she launched into an excited recitation of who she’d met and where she’d been and how she’d momentarily lost her bag. “I just met the nicest boy. His name is Eduardo, and he taught me how to salsa dance!” I could hear kids laughing in the background; I felt a wave of relief wash over me until the cell phone abruptly cut off.

  “Hello…Mary…Hello?”

  I waited a minute for her to call back, but nothing, so I dialed her cell phone. It rang and rang and rang some more. Where was she? Was she with Eduardo? Wait a minute, who was Eduardo the salsa dancer? What was the legal age for marriage without parental consent in that country? As I Googled an answer I reminded myself of one of my wife’s sayings, Paranoia will destroy ya, which was true, but as her father it was natural for me to imagine the worst possible scenario was unfolding at some undisclosed location, in another country. I hit redial again, and a man answered. It was not Eduardo.

  “Hi, this is Chuck Norris….”

  For her sixteenth birthday I had asked the real Chuck Norris—the same guy about whom somebody on the Internet has invented hundreds of Chuck Norris-isms, like “Chuck Norris has two speeds, walk and kill,” the Mr. Norris who was one of Mary’s cultural icons—to record her phone message. He had graciously complied, and his message was what I was hearing.

  “Mary Doocy can’t come to the phone right now, because we’re out fighting crime,” Chuck Norris announced in his famous monotone. “Leave your message at the sound of the snapping neck.” Beeeeeeeep.

  “Mary, it’s Dad. Call us when you can.”

  It was hard for me to let my son travel alone to England, but it was exponentially tougher for a father to let his little princess fly away from our little cocoon to the land of the kidney pie. For every parent saying good-bye to any children, regardless of the time apart, it is tough. We raise them as best we can, we teach them stuff like how to start a pilot light or change the spare tire, even though we know they’re not paying attention, because they know we’ll always be there to help them. And just when our children get to be young adults and truly a joy to be around, they leave us to start their own lives.

  Mary would return in five weeks, and we would all survive what was her first big step toward a lifetime of independence. She knows that wherever she goes and whatever she does, between her mother, her siblings, Chuck Norris, and me, she’ll never be alone.

  20

  College

  Can I Pay with Bonus Miles?

  The University of San Diego is a stunning movie-set campus atop a mountain. My daughter Mary was very interested in attending, and I could see why. Some campuses have tanning pools; others, sushi bars. This one had both, and an In ’N’ Out Burger down the hill. After a ninety-minute tour, we walked through one of the dorms, which had an impressive security system and the homey smell of just-popped corn, and there was not a single beer can in the recycling bin.

  “I love it here,” Mary told me in a hushed tone so the tour guide could not hear that they were about to hook another student.

  Then I saw a twenty-year-old guy just exiting the shower walking directly through our group, wearing only a towel. “Coming through, excuse me.” He was parting our tour group in two, like Moses in terry cloth.

  A genuine glimpse of college life. I was intrigued that the surfer dude was so comfortable that he could parade barefoot and practically naked past forty total strangers. Then it hit me—it was three thirty on a Thursday afternoon at a Catholic college, in a girls’ dorm.


  Boy in towel + girls’ dorm = over my dead body.

  Why didn’t the admissions office warn students, “We’ve got prospective applicants coming through this afternoon; please wear pants”?

  During their high school junior years, my children started asking us to take them on college tours across the country. We would spend hours listening to dynamic student salesmen as they described meal plans, campus parking, and Wi-Fi hot spots, all while walking backward.

  In the almost thirty years since I’d gone to college a lot changed. On my first freshman day at the University of Kansas, I registered for classes, opened my first bank account, and met a blond girl at a dance in the dorm parking lot who showed me how cute she could be by puking her guts out in my lobby’s garbage can.

  “You okay?” It sounded like I was worried. In reality, I just hoped she would not notice that I was not using either her first or her last name, both of which I’d forgotten thirty seconds after we met. It had been a mistake for my roommate to invite her over to our dorm, and I could tell by how fast she was drinking that sloe gin, and by how much, that she was clearly a party girl who probably grew up playing with Divorce Barbie, which came with all of Ken’s stuff.

  “It’s probably just the liquor talking,” I said, but she snoozed through whatever I had to say. That very morning my own father had told me to make the most of my college days because I was the first member of my entire family tree ever to enroll in college, and he wanted me to experience something that he never got the chance to.

  “Need a Tic Tac?” had been a thoughtful question on my part, but that night I learned that the alcoholically comatose generally don’t worry about how minty fresh their breath is.

  Suddenly I felt more than a little guilty that my parents had trusted me to be responsible, and there I was with a newfound independence I’d never imagined, as evidenced by the deeply breathing blonde who just needed a chalk outline. It was one of those “You’re not in Kansas anymore” moments, but I was still in Kansas.

  “Dorothy…?” Was her name Dorothy? Debbie? Denise? Darn it, never mind.

  Why did I go to the University of Kansas? Easy. I was almost a native, and with my grades they had to let me in. I entertained the idea of an exclusive school in the East, but my parents insisted that they could never afford to send me anywhere past St. Louis, so I passed on the chance to go Ivy, where I would certainly have inexplicably affected a Belgian accent.

  Instead I went to KU, where, thanks to my family’s income level, I got grants and scholarships and loans, and I was able to work my way through college, eventually graduating with distinction, magna cum lucky. My Western Civilization instructor told me at the conclusion of his class, “You, sir, have the greatest vocabulary I’ve ever heard.” I thanked him for the compliment but made a mental note that he was from Pakistan.

  When I became a father myself, I discovered that nothing proclaimed that you were a successful parent more than the window sticker of a really prestigious college in the back of the station wagon. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale all trump Hooterville State University, which would not impress anybody unless your neighbor is Larry the Cable Guy.

  Still in his high school junior year, our son, Peter, seemed content to live at home forever with no interest in leaving the cocoon. Eventually we forced him to sit down and draw up a list of schools. He really didn’t care about his future academic career. At that point he would have put down College of Cardinals and filed for early admission.

  “Hey, it says here you have to be a priest!” he’d realize, filling out the College of Cardinals application. “I don’t want to be a priest. They work weekends.”

  Eventually a list was drawn up, a series of campus tours was made, as his mother wore off five thousand miles of tire tread so that he could eventually winnow his favorites down to two.

  “Let the brownnosing begin.”

  At one of the top schools in America I was told point-blank, “Relax, he’s in.” That from a university official who had that week donated a million dollars to the school. Not leaving anything to chance, I also ingratiated myself with one of that university’s most powerful graduates, who at that moment was mounting a run for president of the United States. His letter of recommendation arrived on impressive U.S. Senate stationery; we knew that it was the icing on the college cake. April first, at five in the afternoon, I logged on to their .edu website and got the good news.

  “Admission denied. Have a good day.”

  This same school had all but promised another family that their student son would also be admitted, and with that they wrote a one-million-dollar donation for an open-ended research program where students probably stand in lab coats and watch Oprah. That rich kid also was denied, after the check was cashed. Cue up the theme song to Shaft.

  Luckily Peter’s other first choice, Villanova, said yes, and invited him to spend the next four years in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia. As a parent I was filled with a stratospheric sense of pride as I applied the prestigious Villanova sticker above the defogger strips in the back window of our car. Of course we would no longer be able to buy gasoline, because that sticker would cost me $42,703 a year for the next four years, not including stuffed-crust pizza.

  Years earlier I lost track of the number of times I’d wake up in the middle of the night, doing college tuition computations: “Three kids, four years each…” Then I’d move a decimal point in my head, content to know that my deserving children would all get world-class educations, and all I’d have to do is sell one kidney.

  “I forgot to tell you when you got home,” my wife said middinner. “I mailed his tuition yesterday.” That sent a jolt of electricity directly to my gizzard. It wasn’t due for two months.

  “You did what?”

  I’d been doing mental gymnastics figuring how I’d eventually finance college by borrowing money from my 401(k) and then transferring it into my checking account at the last possible moment, but my wife short-circuited the entire process with a check she wrote on the way to pick up the dry cleaning.

  “I paid early because I didn’t want them to change their minds,” she said, and it seemed to make perfect sense, so I excused myself to do some emergency online banking.

  “I thought we were going to check with the bursar’s office to see if we could pay with bonus miles.”

  The money part was terrifying only until it was time actually to start college, when a lifetime of a parent’s hopes and dreams and fears amount to a single haphazard pyramid of clean laundry, desk lamps, and cheesy crackers piled on the curb in front of a dorm. Just as Kathy dropped him off for his first day of kindergarten, my wife was the one who dropped him off at college as he made the official transition from our house to frat house. Kathy called me every half hour with updates, but the most wrenching was her final report: After a prayer for the students everybody said good-bye to their students only to get into their cars and pull out at exactly the same time. Stuck in a colossal traffic jam, there was not one horn honking.

  “Everybody in every car is crying,” she whispered.

  “He’ll be back. He needs stuff,” I assured her, which was easy for me because I was six thousand miles away with his sisters, still on vacation. Her heart was broken, so I reminded her, “It’s only three weeks until you see him again. We’ll be there for parents’ weekend.”

  It was there that I was introduced to Peter’s roommates, which was in itself surprising because he was supposed to have only one. They were very nice guys, but the dorm room was built for two humans. Due to an enrollment boom, three testosterone factories would be holed up in a nonventilated twelve-by-fifteen cinder-block room for an entire academic year. In college terms it’s referred to as a forced triple; it should really be called a sinus volcano.

  Disillusioned at Peter’s being warehoused in a small room for a year with two guys, I tried some positive spin. “It’s college, not a Canyon Ranch spa,” I said. Then I did the math in my head, and four years at Cany
on Ranch would actually cost me less than this place.

  When I stood up from his desk chair at the end of my first dorm visit I discovered that I’d unwittingly sat on a damp towel and the crotch of my khaki pants was soaked, which explained why for his first two semesters Peter’s friends would refer to me as “the Depends dad.”

  Thus started Peter’s career in college. He got great grades in every class except Italian, for the simple reason that those confounding people in Italy insist on not speaking English.

  A towering six five now, he is regarded as literally the big man on campus: an announcer at the basketball games, active in the fraternity scene, student politics, and the college radio station. So we were surprised when he reported that he was outright barred from entering an important lecture.

  “Why can’t I go in?”

  “Sold out,” the guy with the walkie-talkie told Peter.

  Whom would college kids stand in line to see and hear? An aging radical or dissident? A skinny despot from a dangerous country building a nuke reactor? No and no, Peter was not allowed to see the band Hanson.

  “Full house. One more and the fire marshal will close us down,” the security guard told him, waving him away, but Peter would not take no for an answer.

  Hanson’s song “MMMBop” had been the single tune at our house that all three of our kids of various ages could sing together, because that was all there was to the lyric: “Mmm bop, Mmm bop.” With his childhood idols just on the other side of that closed door, he knew something he could do to crash the gate. He dashed up the hill to the campus bookstore, where he bought the fattest, blackest marker manufactured. Then in what I would like to think was the first time he’d ever stripped to the waist in the dining hall restroom, he practiced tracing some words across his chest. Confident that he had the spacing right, he took the cap off the marker, stared into the mirror, and wrote nipple to nipple Hanson #1. It was big and bold, and why wouldn’t it be? He’d used the Sanford Magnum 44 Permanent Marker. The 44 apparently stood for the IQ of a college kid who would write the name of an aging boy band on his chest.