I want to apologize to my kids for not knowing how much baking powder to put in pancake batter. Sorry about all those hockey pucks. On the bright side, your first time at a nice breakfast buffet must have been an eye opener. But ask yourself, did they flip them with a flourish? Did they assert the five-second rule when they missed? Were there bad versions of John Denver songs about fine fiddles and cakes on the griddle?
It’s little wonder that two of you ended up on stage for a time. You were raised by a performative dad. In addition to physical flourishes, there were songs and puns. So many wonderful puns. You thought they were wonderful, too, right? Or is that like asking a former hostage who is slightly afraid of recapture whether they enjoyed their jailer’s comedy routine?
Was I like a jailer? I don’t think you thought that. More like an unreliable security guard, I would say. If you were in my first batch, my work orphans, you would come home and maybe I would be there, maybe not. If you were in my second batch, I was home so much you might have wished for a little less constructive supervision.
The problem with me as a father is that I was a country boy at heart, infatuated with everything in the wide world, the pull of lonesome train whistles, the flirtatious winking of sun coming up in the morning. You must have gotten sick of hearing me sing those songs, or at least wished I would take singing lessons.
I still feel all that. We never really grow up, do we? I may not have made the best pancakes, but I made them with delight in you and me and the moment. I hope that if you learned anything from me, you learned that. And to use more baking powder.
