Dad Thought Better

When I was a boy, Dad practiced a ceremony whenever I asked him to buy me something. Let’s call it the refusal-surrender ritual. It went something like this:

Vignette 1: Scanning the sports section of the Cincinnati Post, I noticed an advertisement for go-carts—we called them jitneys back in the day—for $99. It was a no-frills jitney, basically a pull-start lawn-mower engine mounted on a bare-bones steel frame with a steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, and solid rubber wheels. Still, the prospect of my having a small motorized vehicle seemed enticingly grown up, and an enticingly less arduous mode of transportation than my labor-intensive Huffy. So, I showed the jitney ad to Dad and asked if he’d buy me one.
“No! You’re too young to be driving one of those things. Besides, you need to be 16 to drive in the streets.”

“But, Dad, . . .”

“I said no. You’re too young to be operating something like that. Let alone take care of it.”

“But . . .”

And here I got the “dad stare,” the nonverbal equivalent of “End of discussion, so don’t push it.”

Three days later, a Saturday, while I was at the breakfast table spooning up Sugar Pops, Dad approached me with the ad in hand and said, “How about we go take a look at those jitneys.” We looked, he cautioned, he bought.

Vignette 2: Several weeks before my birthday, I asked for a BB gun. Most of the boys in the neighborhood had lever-action,Winchester-like Red Ryders, and I was keen to have one so I, like them, could be Daniel Booned and Kit Carsonized and participate in the “hunting expeditions” they related with such stirring enthusiasm. So, when Dad asked what I wanted for my birthday, I immediately replied, “A BB rifle.”

“A BB rifle! What, are you crazy? A gun? Do you know how dangerous those things can be”?

“But, Dad, it’s just a BB gun”!

And I swear, some 27 years before A Christmas Story appeared, Dad said, “Yeah, and with `just a BB gun’ you can put out your eye. Or somebody else’s.”

“Well, I’d be careful. Besides, everybody else has one.”

“So, if everybody else jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?

Dad had me there. We’d driven across the 100 foot-high Roebling Suspension Bridge several times on forays into Kentucky. No way I’d jump from 100 feet in the air, even if my best friends Jeffrey Baker and Terry Finklemeier did.

When my birthday arrived, after the cake and ice cream, Dad went into his den and emerged with two wrapped boxes. I knew from the shape of one that it was a BB gun—and what a BB gun: a Daisy Pump-Action Rifle, with wood grip stock, front sight, adjustable rear sight, and a screw-in spring-loading tube that held 52 BBs—no frustratingly inefficient gravity feed with this gun. The Daisy Pump-Action was a high-performance BB rifle, easily the most powerful and accurate on the market. Red Ryders paled into pipsqueakery compared to the shotgun-like Pump-Action. And the second present? A Daisy BB pistol. Thus fully weaponized, I allowed my imagination to swell and thicken with images of me leading my friends on the next trailblazing excursion into the “wilds,” a microwoods three blocks away consisting of a miserly stand of trees and some undergrowth scrub.

I did not ponder Dad’s dialectic of denial and capitulation, and I certainly did not question him about it, for that would surely rouse a pillaging jinx from its slumber. When I thought of it at all, I considered it as something akin to the unaccountable, unmerited dispensation of grace the Dominican sisters at elementary school told us about. Sometimes, of course, the “no” stood: bunk bed (vetoed due to my brother Dennis’s vehement opposition), hamsters (“big rats”), night-vision goggles, electric guitar, in-ground swimming pool (no “no” necessary; the look of incredulity said it all). Sometimes, “OK” was the immediate response: books, sports equipment, chemistry set, Lionel Model Train set, board games, acoustic guitar. Still, Dad’s strange alchemy of converting the base metal of “no” to the gold of “yes” occurred on enough occasions that I developed my own small ceremony: request—wait—celebrate.

Years later, talking with Mom about some of Dad’s peculiarities (“I’d need a brand-new ball point to list them all,” she claimed), I mentioned how I wondered about Dad’s propensity to flatly refuse my boyish requests for a jitney and BB gun, and then refuse the refusal. “Oh, that,” Mom said; “after he said `no’ he thought better of it.” Thought better of it. I was struck by that clause, and what it could mean.

Of course, in common usage it means to change one’s mind, to revise, upon reflection, an initial decision. Interestingly, brain scanning cognitive psychologists claim empirical evidence supports that interpretation. It seems that, when faced with a decision, rational thought is a second-order response. Emotions precede reason. Scans indicate that decision-making begins in an emotion-processing part of the brain’s limbic system, then hitches its way to reason’s jurisdiction, the neocortex. Once there, however, reason rationalizes the original gut reaction, a process known as confirmation bias. This bias is modified or overcome in a social context, in talking with others and being exposed to alternative perspectives. And while she never said so, I know that it was Mom who provided Dad with that perception-altering context.

Still, I wondered about the nature of that alteration. Yes, Dad “thought better of it,” and it’s likely talking with Mom caused it, but what underlay the cause to give it triggering persuasiveness. And here I focused on the words “thought better.” What does it mean to think better? I would venture this: I had made a claim to Dad’s consideration. He could have let that initial “no” be the final word, could have dismissed my little boy wants as irresponsible, as a brochure of unnecessary needs, as blinkered immaturity. He could have thought no more about it. But, no; instead, he thought better. He regarded me, was mindful of me, treated me with solicitude, attended to me, beyond the “no.” He absorbed my desires and made them as important as his own. He imagined his way into my interior space, that place of wanting, and felt his way around, charted its contours, took measurements. He held me in his regard, as surely as he held my hand when we crossed a street, as surely as he clasped my shoulder after I pitched the winning game in the Little League World Series, as surely as he held my eyes in his when we talked about my upcoming marriage, as surely as he cradled the back of my neck as he lay dying and whispered “I’m glad you’re here.”

Dad held me in his regard. Prompted by Mom, the messenger RNA in my folks’ helix information exchange. He thought. Better. Deeper. He pondered me. Not from outside my small desiring world. Inside. I was ponderable. All the way down.