WHAT ARE SOME OF MY BEST DAD JOKES?

WHAT DOES A FATHER DO?

WHAT DOES A FATHER SAY?

sit on the chair with your trousers and underwear around your ankles. your face and genitals should be hidden behind an open broadsheet sports section. sniffle, turn the page, cough. sit still for minute or two. sniffle again, turn the page. cough again. sit still for a minute or too. turn the page. sniffle. cough. turn the page. (a knocking will begin but you are to ignore it.)

My father used to always play-wrestle with my two sisters and I (I am a girl too). He was probably a bit rougher than he meant to be but he never actually hurt us. One day he was wrestling me. he was licking my face—which meant it was a serious wrestle, and that before too long it would be a tickle-fest. my two sisters jumped in to help. We ended up ripping his pyjamas to pieces in this bizarre, hysterical, joyful rage….like Banshees.

I hate it when I tell this story to people and they think it is somehow kinky. How is it kinky? It is a father and his three daughters…what are people thinking? So he used to wrestle us? So what? He used to kiss us on the lips too. He still does. He used to kiss my husband on the cheek whenever they met. He used to kiss the cat on the forehead every morning. He was just an affectionate man. Sometimes I thought of him as a big gorilla playing with his family. I still think of him like that.

When I am a father I will cherish and nurture my child as if it were an egg. I will cradle the egg to my breast so that it can hear my heart beating for it. I will not crack the shell of the egg with a spoon and then smear it on buttered toast, and then consume it with coffee. I will not send the egg off to school without an appropriate lunch. I will not berate the egg if it should decide it is a gay egg. I will not let the egg watch too much violence on television, though I will use my discretion depending on how violent the times are in reality. I will not smack the egg, should it make lapses of moral judgement along the way. I will not break its shell. Rather, I will sit the egg down and explain the error of its ways, and encourage the egg to make amends. I will try and be a good example to the egg. I shall not boil the egg and keep it in a fridge and then slice it up and add it to salad. I will expose the egg to the joy that is music and art and world football. I will agree with the egg that life is hard. I will not fry the egg and eat it along with some bacon and cooked tomatoes. I will hold the egg’s hand if it is frightened. I will reveal as quickly as possible to the egg that Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, the bogeyman, vampires, werewolves and bunyips are all factors of human imagination. I will reveal as late as possible to the egg that there are evil human beings in the world that are real. I will not poach the egg. I will put a band-aid on the egg’s knee if it is grazed. I will kiss the egg better. I will tell the egg that everything is going to be ok. I will not scramble the egg with a dash of milk in the frying pan, and eat it with cracked pepper and hot toast. I will tell the egg that it is an important and loved egg. I will teach the egg to find others important, and to love them. I will eventually teach the egg to drive a car, but I will encourage it to ride a bike where possible. I will teach the egg to love reading and to love thinking. I will not toss the egg as I high as I can in the air and wait for it to slam into the ground and break open. I will never do that. I will keep the egg warm in whatever winters we face. Most importantly, I will teach the egg to learn. I will teach the egg to learn.

I hated how my Dad used to wear long socks and sandals. I developed a strong passionate dislike for any combination of socks and thongs, socks and sandals, long socks in any colour, and even without sandals. To this day, when I see socks and sandals, I see my Dad. He also used to wear these tiny cotton shorts. Seriously. They barely covered his balls. He wasn’t gay. He didn’t even look gay. But they were like sky-blue hot-pants for the over 40’s male. I think it was because he liked to show off his legs. He had lean legs like a gazelle. They were a deep healthy brown, slightly hairy, muscular. They were great legs. It’s because he used to run every day. I would remember him coming into my room every morning and trying to get me to go with him. At least he did that for a while. And then he stopped. I remember that on the day that he stopped asking me that I had decided I would give it a try. I was going to surprise him. I was all dressed up in my running gear with my sneakers on, lying underneath my quilt, ready to leap out when he came in to my room. But he didn’t come in that morning. Then I heard the front door open and shut I realised he was running off without me.

My dad’s great legs were the only part of his body that were great. They almost looked as if they shouldn’t belong to him, because the rest of his body was a mess. He had a slightly flabby ghost-white torso, the kind you would imagine belonged to a mental patient or something. His nipples were misshapen, ugly, out of place like someone had dripped coffee on his chest. His arms were like twisted roots. A scar ran down one of them from when an ex-girlfriend attacked him with a knife. His hands were stained with tobacco and permanently sticky somehow – like he was continually spilling juice on them and not noticing or something. His neck was bulgy and veiny and well, almost scaly. Always dry. It was as if it was the part of him that remained untouched, by soap, by water, by my mother’s lips. like a kind of country cul-de-sac that you see from the highway but never drive down.

His face was rubbery. I think it was because he used to rub it a lot. I think he loosened the skin somehow. Mum was always telling him to stop rubbing his face. Particularly his eyes. My dad had eyes that were more gentle than a rabbit’s. Kind, fucking kind eyes, he had. And a big nose. You could never stay mad at him when he peered over his big nose at you. Not that you could really ever get mad at him in the first place.

I remember the feel of my dad’s hair. it was always greasy, the slippery equivalent of his sticky hands. He used to tell me he hadn’t washed it since 1968. ‘Hair washes itself’, he used to say. ‘What? Do you think that the cavemen used to use shampoo?’

He shaved though. Obsessively. And ultra-clumsily. A day when I didn’t see my dad with some sort of band-aid or rolled up scrap of toilet paper hanging off his face was a day when I didn’t see my dad.

His breath stank of beer and cigarettes and garlic. He used to eat garlic and buttered ravioli pretty much every second night for dinner. Slurp at it like an orphan, which by the time I knew him, he was.

1. He liked to dress up in top hat and tails as often as possible – whenever the situation called for it, or could call for it, or could be seen to possibly be appropriate, or he could get away with it. He loved a good cummerbund and had the proper kind of bow tie that you had to tie in a fancy knot. My sister and I became experts in attaching the breastplate bit of the special shirt with the tiny round, shiny buttons, it helped to have little fingers. He was like a human version of Puss in Boots.

2. He owned an alpine – style sheep or goat shepherd’s horn, 1.5 meters long. It was strung up by the front door on fishing wire, next to the collection of antique walking sticks. Every night before dinner he would take it down, step into the front lawn and give it an almighty blow. You could hear it throughout the whole suburb. My sister and I, happily playing at a neighbour’s house, would groan with embarrassment, our friends would tease us, and we would run home for dinner.

3. He was beyond polite and courteous, always opening doors for ladies, pulling out the seat from under the table, deferring to the female company, being utterly charming.

4. He eyes would mist up fairly regularly when talking about people and how much they meant to him.

5. His use of language – “bottom” was “b-o-t-tom”, being full was having had “an adequate sufficiency”. He would start all bedtime stories with “Once upon a time when hogs were swine and monkeys chewed tobacco, and the birds of the air built nests in the beards of men…”

6. Taste in music – Foster and Allen, James Galway, Foster and Allen, James Galway, Foster and Allen. His favourite song to sing in the pub – Yellow Bird or Edelweiss. His dream came true in 1987 when he starred as Captain von Trapp in the Spastic Centres of South Australia’s production of “The Sound Of Music”. Unfortunately all of his children had severe physical and intellectual disabilities and all were in wheelchairs.

7. He liked to keep his fine grey and white hair at an even shoulder length, and for special nights out he would always blowdry it using a curling brush. When we reached a certain age my sister and I were allowed to take on the hairdressing duties.

8. He loved ballroom dancing.

9. He would talk of his years as a magician and the solemnity of the worldwide magician’s circle of secrecy.

10. He would talk of a childhood of six kids to a bed, an orange for Christmas and walking to school in the snow in bare feet, milking the cows and churning the cream for butter every morning, being dressed as a girl for three years to keep the fairies from stealing him, and knowing the bush in the local church grounds where he was discovered as a baby.

My brother and I have the same hands. Bitch hands. That’s what his students call them, I suppose because they are ladylike. Because I am a woman, a ‘bitch’, does that mean that mine are ‘bitch hands’ or are they only ‘bitch hands’ when attached to a man? Bitch is being bandied about so much these days soon we’ll be calling all women ‘bitches’ and no-one will be offended.

My father called my mother a bitch. She wasn’t offended, she was shocked and upset. It was the way it was said, I suppose. He didn’t say….. ‘Oh, no you’re not a Bitch at all, are you?’. (kindly). He said “Oh, no you’re not a bitch at all, are you?’. (vicious sarcasm).
It made her run into the laundry and hide, it was said with such viciousness.

Don’t you bring sand into the house!!! Where do you think we are? The beach? Go outside.

My father also has small hands. We get them from him. He loved winter because he could wear bulky mittens as a disguise. The mittens were made of that rough colourful wool…made somewhere in South America. When I wear mittens I make sure that they are smooth, synthetic and dull.

Don’t you dare eat that. Oh brilliant. That is just brilliant. Well done! Outside now!

Small hands. Small hands and hot feet.
The other night there we all were having dinner at my father’s girlfriend’s house and his girlfriend pipes up and tells us about a special blanket she had to make for their bed, with a piece cut out of it so that Dad’s feet could stay cool. ‘And yet’ She said “he has cold feet when it comes to marrying me!”. I told her that she shouldn’t wish for that because he is a sarcastic arsehole. He told me I deserved a medal for that intelligent, informed comment and clipped me over the ear, even though I am 33.

Not again. Come here. You come here now! Ok, go outside then. I don’t care.

Dad isn’t really a bad father, just has a few unfortunate habits I suppose. There is nothing worse than a man who belittles people who are less confident or weaker than him.

Oh, yes that’s great. Really lovely painting. A real Picasso! (sarcasm)

If I inherited small hands and hot feet from Dad, what did I get from my mother? (long pause) Consistent parenting.

Wash your hands and I’ll give you some chips for being a good boy.

My father smacked me for playing with scissors.
My father is a good man.
My father was born in 1944.
My father was going to write a book proving that black holes didn’t exist.
My father bought me the Sound of Music sheet music.
My father had a green vest that is now one of my most treasured possessions.
My father was a Park Ranger.
My father is lonely.
My father read stories to me every night before bed.
My father taught me to make a mean batch of French toast.
My father was never taught how to show affection.
My father died just as I was starting to relate to him as an adult.
My father was a bit character in my development.
My father is a passionate Collingwood supporter.
My father never noticed me when I was little.
My father has little hands and feet.
My father is one of twelve children.
My father wore a cream coloured hand knitted jumper and knee high ugg boots.
My father was awkward in social situations and I was not very forgiving.
My father gets dermatitis from soap allergies.
My father slapped me across the face in front of a boyfriend when I was fifteen.
My father died in Scotland.
My father hums constantly.
My father has never met me.
My father gave me the gift of music.
My father is a quiet dad.
My father hit me to keep me quiet.
My father would sit on the toilet with the newspaper for what felt like about three hours.
My father is a workaholic.
My father is just some guy who porked my mother.
My father lives in Broken Hill.
My father is dead.
My father got a perm in the eighties.
My father calls me sweetheart.
My father has been with his new partner for 14 years.
My father had an issue with Martina Navratilova and called her horsey face.
My father didn’t want children.
My father hasn’t worked for 18 months.
My father makes sound effects when pouring a cup of tea.
My father thinks he is cleverer than my mother but he is wrong.
My father is gentle.
My father cried when our cat died.
My father played Heart of Gold on the guitar over and over again.
My father would play wrestle me and my two sisters.
My father is a born again Christian.
My father had a parachuting accident before I was born.
My father has a beard.
My father has a tattoo of my mother’s name.
My father always used to wear long socks and sandals.
My father would walk up the hill to feed the chickens with his arms outstretched and they would fly up and sit on him.
My father cooked slices of black pudding into his pancakes.
My father was a gymnast at high school.
My father is still in love with my mother.
My father drove a taxi.
My father has two sons from his second marriage.
My father fought in the first and second world wars.
My father pulled out our wobbly teeth with a pair of pliers.
My father keeps pretty much to himself.
My father’s father died when he was four years old.
My father has complete collections of Asterix and Tintin comics and organises his records in alphabetical order.
My father lives near Wodonga and I met him for the first time this year.