A My Dad Story:

I remember once waiting as a teenager with my dad in an unusually long line at our friendly neighborhood McDonald’s. Not that’s it’s unusual to wait in line at McDonalds; I only mean that this particular line was maybe a little longer than usual. The following story, one typical of my father, took place:

It is only when dad finally gets up to the cashier who says, “Can I help you?” that this royal patriarch decides to browse the menu for something that might appeal to his refined and sophisticated pallet. After a minute or so he appears smugly dissatisfied with the selection on the tacky back-lit-plastic-wall-mounted menu that hasn’t changed in 30 years and says something seriously like, “What kind of soup do you have?”

“What kind of soup do you have?” . . .

At McDonald’s.

I might add that he WORKED at McDonald’s decades before as a teenager.

. . . “What kind of soup do you have?”

Then he actually looks disappointed and hurt at the cashier’s negative reply. He appears to be mustering up a shred of pity out of which, he believes, is the only reason he would continue on the path of entering into a business transaction with an establishment that has so deeply let him down by delivering the startling revelation: “We Don’t Serve Soup.”

Once his order was finally placed, mortified, I rattled off my order, as well as, my kid brother’s without any consideration of what he actually wanted in the record time of 2.3 seconds. I suppose I was attempting, in some way, to make up for the extra time my dad had taken not only of the cashier, but also of the sequence of normal people behind us in the line. My brother would’ve probably chosen to have me order in this fashion for while only a wee lad, still plenty old enough to feel the embarrassment of the situation. The cashier would say “That will be $14.48 please.”

It was this kind of statement that, somehow, always seemed to take my father by surprise; and that prompted him to conduct an immediate but not at all hurried all-garment pocket search. He’d check all his pockets, which was no small task because he prides himself as a wearer of the kind of leather jacket with an elastic waistband and about twenty-five hidden compartments where each and every pocket is at least a double pocket and then each one of those is a triple pocket, all of them with snaps, Velcro or zippers OR snaps and Velcro and zippers.

He checked each and every one of them with a sequence of rhythmically steady self-frisking hand motions, which for brief moments in time bared a resemblance to the Macarena dance. Mere common men would likely reveal some extent of embarrassment to be in this apparent predicament, but our father swayed out this whole boogie without a hint of self-consciousness or even seeming awareness that he’d placed an order at a public business, without knowing the whereabouts of his wallet.

At the end of the painful performance he would at last, from somewhere deep inside that Leather Castanza, withdraw his car keys and hold them out to me, jingling slightly, with one simple invitation: “Will you go out to the car; and get my wallet?”

“@#$%#&*!”