The Daily Tannenbaum The stigmata of the single life.*

Since I’ve never met every dad in the world, I can’t truthfully make the claim that my father is “the best Dad in the world,” but he’s my favorite dad ever, and today’s his birthday!  This is us in Nappa Valley earlier this year:

I got my inability to keep my eyes open while smiling from his side of the family, as you can see here.

So what makes him so great? For one thing, I’m a well-adjusted (for the most part) grown-up partially because of his great parenting. And then there are these other things I love about him:

1. The story of how my parents met.  I wasn’t there, so this is the makeshift version that exists in my head after hearing it a few times.  My mother had been dating a few guys that just weren’t great.  At dinner one night with her childhood friend and her friend’s new husband, she told them, “I just wish I could meet a guy who isn’t all about smoking and drinking and parties.  The kind of guy you marry.”  And that’s when her friend’s husband thought of his acquaintance at the law firm and said, “Oh Elizabeth, do I have the man for you.”

2. My dad biked to work before it was cool.  Back when he was a lawyer in the city, instead of driving a car to the park and ride like all the other commuters, he rode his bike to the park and ride and then took the bus into the city.  Sometimes, if the weather was bad, my mom, sister and I would pick him up at the bus at the end of the day so he wouldn’t have to bike in the rain.  Every time we did that, he would always ask why we were there, and when we thought he wasn’t being grateful enough, we’d say, “Oh Dad, go jog home!”

3. But when working in the city got to be too time consuming, he made a commitment to spend more time with his family and went into the bookselling business with my mom.  It was so wonderful to have him home for dinners again, and he even took the time to coach my softball team.  I still wasn’t any good or anything, but I think the other girls really liked that of all the coaches, he was the most level-headed and the least likely to ever get angry and yell.  Ever.

4. Which brings me to the other thing that’s great about Dad.  The only times I’ve ever seen him angry are when Pitt loses at football or basketball, or when the football or baseball Giants lose.  Or when something goes wrong with something electronic.  And even then, it’s only a moment that he’s mad, and you can usually make a joke about something and he snaps out of it.

5. And that brings me to sports and my dad, a topic I believe I’ve covered in the past.  He’s one of the most loyal people in the entire world.  And that is why he still supports the San Fransisco Giants, even though they have not won the World Series since 1954.  That was the year he first started supporting them, because they were a New York team at the time.  And that’s why I’m a Mets fan; because in the pure days before inter-leauge play, we would go to see the Giants whenever they were in town, which meant they were playing The Mets.  Come to think of it, I first started liking the Mets in 1986 when they won the World Series.  I hope that doesn’t mean that my poor team is just as doomed as Dad’s, although…

We went to a Giants game on that same trip to San Fran. Of the four home games they played while we were there, we caught the only one they lost.

6. When I broke my ankle almost a year ago, I lived with my parents for a few weeks.  In that time, I had to make a number of trips back to the Hudson Valley for appointments.  Without ever complaining (except maybe once when we had to leave at 6am) Dad drove me the hour and twenty minutes there and back each time, and stayed during the unbearable waiting rooms, quitely reading the paper.  I don’t know what I would have done if I couldn’t have been able to count on him, and I’m hoping that he’s available on January 15, 2009, the day I’m getting the pins out again.

7. He was my first swimming teacher.  I was born in January of 1978, and there are pictures of me in the summer of 1978, just a few months old, splashing around in the lake with Dad.  He looked so happy, and had a lot more hair…  (He used to like to blame me for hair loss because he would carry me around on his shoulders when I was a toddler, and I would pull it out.  I believed that story for a long time.)

8. There’s a picture of him as a kid wearing a Roy Rodgers shirt.  The picture is hanging in my parents’house.  In it, he looks like a little hellion, and reminds me of the kid from the movie A Christmas Story. I guess it’s no wonder that he’ll watch all 24 hours of the marathon when they do it at Christmastime, if we don’t stop him for pesky things like dinner.

9. I feel really bad about EZ-Pass when it comes to Dad.  As previously mentioned, he’s pretty much the most straight-laced guy when it comes to a lot of things.  But he used to LOVE throwing the change into tollbooths and racing off before the light turned green.  It was the one place in the world where he got to be a real badass, because it’s the one thing in the world that’s easier to do when you’re left-handed.  But the man just can’t be bothered to wait in long lines on the highway, so since he got his EZ-Pass, he’s been looking for a new outlet for his attitude.

10.  There’s only room in my heart to love one Republican, and it’s him.  Because I still can’t understand what my otherwise logical, highly intelligent and socially liberal father sees in the Republican party, I chalk up his allegiance to his fierce loyalty to Abraham Lincoln.  That’s why we can get along so well to this day.  Even if our conversations do stray to the political (just the other night I tried to corner him by bringing up the fact that he once served on a board with a former member of the Weather Underground, and he countered by mentioning that Ohio is not going to have enough time to check all their ballots for faulty registrants) we agree to disagree in the end, usually with the common refrain, “your mother and I have cancelled each other out in every election.”

So that’s my great dad, who I hope is having a great day.  Happy birthday!