Things my Dad taught me

So, I was making bacon in my kitchen yesterday, standing over the pan and thinking about how I make bacon.  Chris and I had had a discussion about it, apparently he had never actually cooked bacon before and made it on my griddle.  I remembered in junior high, when the "bacon from the broiler" that we were making caught fire.  What Rocket Scientist puts cheap bacon that is about 90 % fat close to an open flame, I ask you?   The teacher freaked out and one of us in my pod put it out with flour.  The teacher was pissed off and tried to make us a laughingstock.  I was really upset.  I remember this teacher, Mrs Hupp, without any sort of affection.  I remember she was newly divorced and was forced to go back to work to support her two daughters.  She was unhappy and I suppose being a Home Economics teacher at a junior high school in the "bad" part of town was a real comedown for her.  Never mind she later married one of the other teachers. I remember going home and crying about it.  My dad, who was a professional cook said "the best cooks burn something every now and then."  He was right of course and that should have been the lesson Mrs. Hupp taught us.  You burn something, or something goes wrong, it's how you deal with it that is the important lesson.  The fact that she melted down and a 13 year old took charge....   Well....  You screw up, you fix it or deal with it, but you keep going.

I got my rather quirky sense of humor from my Dad.  The Irish have a saying "if you wait long enough, Everything is funny"  and I suppose that is true.  Life is often hysterically funny.  The Irish have a "gallows humor" that comes out in me from time to time.  My Dad used to say "don't take life so seriously, you don't get out of it alive"  So I try to laugh and find humor is tricky situations.  I had a supervisor once who told me that I laugh too much.  Before I could stop myself, I said "and you don't laugh enough"  She was not pleased with me, but there you have it.  My Dad taught me to find the humor in the everyday.  "You can laugh about it or cry about it" he would say with a shrug when something went wrong.

I am missing my father these days.  What I wouldn't give to sit and talk about cooking, or baseball or hear his stories again.  If I sit very still and am quiet in my heart, I can hear him.  He has only "visited" me once in dreams.  I take that as proof positive there is beer and good Dixieland in the part of heaven he is.  Free of the pain of cancer, he is surely , as my sister and I put on the grave-marker he shares with our mother, "dancing in the clouds."