Father’s Day is coming up, and in the spirit of the holiday, I thought I’d share a quick story about some parenting ideas my dad employed in the early 2000s. I also hope that it may serve as a semi-suitable gift for him since I’ve just spent all my money on a hot air balloon ride over the Lennox complex that turned out to be way less enchanting than I thought it would be. I wish I could just get him a flash drive and tell him it’s voice activated as a gag, but he’s too tech savvy to fall for that, so I’ll probably just give him this essay along with a coupon for mulch or something. This is a story about how my dad used to make me and my brother wear bicycle helmets and PVC pipe insulation on our heads when we rode in his truck. Here we go.
My dad was always concerned about safety to an unreasonable degree, maybe since he ended up with severely uncoordinated children who often rode their bikes into parked cars or fell down because they couldn’t balance on flat terrain. We were the types of kids whose gym teacher would suggest that we practice skipping at home so as to keep up with what should be the normal progression of basic human motor functions. My dad was wary about letting us walk down steps until we were 6, so we spent many years sliding down steps instead– seemingly because if we started on the ground then we couldn’t possibly trip and fall lower (a sentiment that I now live my life by in a more symbolic manner). This way we could glide down on our butts like a luging event catered specifically to the dangerously unathletic.
When I was a kid, my dad owned a large red pickup truck with a backseat that was comprised of two fold-out chairs and had barely enough space to contain me and my brother. It had seat belts that were fairly loose and were more of a decorative feature than a safety feature.
The pickup truck was old and not well suited for small children. But my dad loved it and saw no reason to stop driving it, so he decided that I would simply wear a large bike helmet to keep my head from smashing through a window when the decorative seatbelt failed me. This horrified my mom, who was less concerned with the danger aspect and more concerned that we would look like idiots riding around with helmets on and no bikes in the bed of the pickup truck to offer any reasonable explanation as to why. My dad, who was 0% concerned with our image, didn’t care and continued this practice for years.
Many similar incidents followed in which my dad had a practical idea that my mom would shoot down as if she were my PR manager who was worried about me coming off as an eccentric to the public and damaging my promising political career. Years later my dad suggested that I wear a large rain poncho and goulashes to high school to shield me from the elements when walking from the parking lot to my locker. Before he was even finished with the sentence, my mom interjected with “No. She’s not wearing a rain poncho. Jesus. No.” Ironically, she was totally fine with me wearing the PVC pipe insulation on my head.
The PVC pipe insulation was another makeshift solution to a car trip problem. When we would go on family car trips, my dad would use cables to strap a small, boxy TV to the floor of our car so we could watch Pokémon. This was before those fancy in-car TVs, and there were no headphones, so everyone in the car had to listen to 8 hours of Pokémon, regardless of their age or patience level.
Once on a drive to Michigan, we hit a bad snowstorm. Other cars were essentially running us off the road due to poor visibility, and my dad was understandably stressed as he tried to keep us on course. What almost made him snap wasn’t the storm or the fellow drivers’ road rage or the traffic, but the deafening sound of Pokémon, which had to be cranked to maximum volume for me to hear it in the backseat. So as he was swerving around trying to keep our car from spiraling out on black ice, he also got to hear Ash scream attack commands to Pikachu during a fight with a wild Bulbasaur. This is more stressful than you would think, especially since most of the dialogue in Pokémon is screamed and some Pokémon make noises that can sound like approaching sirens. And if he had turned it off or turned it down, then he would have to listen to me complain about how I was out of pretzels/fight my brother/imitate a bop-it to entertain myself.
As soon as we reached an exit, he found a Radio Shack and purchased headphones for us. The problem was that the headphones were too big and the ear coverings hung at our chins instead of over our ears. My dad, however, had no intention of giving up and resigning to a trip full of the deafening audio of Ash’s trip to Viridian City, and so he went to the nearest hardware store, purchased PVC pipe insulation, cut it down the middle, and slipped it on the headband part of the headphones to raise them up so they would sit at our ears. This, once again, made us look like morons (or maybe just very trendy pre-teens who were ahead of their time in fashion; I’m still waiting to see a PVC pipe headband in a fashion week collection in hopes that it will validate my younger self’s travel style).
My mom didn’t seem to care too much about our look at this point since she was also sick of the Pokémon audio and “had a migraine.” I distinctly remember cars going to pass ours, catching a glimpse of two kids with giant PVC pipe insulation on their heads and blissfully ignorant smiles on their faces as if they were being unknowingly taken to a sanitarium, and slowing down so as to catch a glimpse of the freak show that was our Honda Odyssey.
My parents sometimes still make fun of me for wearing the headphones, which is insane because they caused it. I had no idea what it looked like because there was no mirror and I was 7. They had the ability to see what I looked like and also fully developed senses of judgment, yet still let it happen. It’s like drawing a Hitler mustache on a baby and then calling the baby racist. One person is clearly in the wrong and it’s not the baby (spoiler alert: the person in the wrong is me for writing that analogy).
As weird as all his ideas were, however, they all worked. That was some top-notch, MacGyver-style parenting, and I’d give it an A+. So if you are looking for a gift for your father, please consider purchasing the book that my dad is currently writing, entitled “Yeah, That Works Well Enough: A Guide to Keeping Your Children Safe and Quiet When On a Car Trip to a Hardware Store.” It’s a fun read. Happy Father’s Day, Dad! Take the day to celebrate with your favorite activity: drinking an IPA no one’s heard of then falling asleep during an episode of NOVA.
–Janie Beaufore, Staff Member