DelBloggolo: REALLY!

Monday, May 11, 2015

REALLY!

“It’s so hot outside, a dog is chasing a cat down the street and they are walking!”

Being when I talk I like to emphasize facts to the extreme, I sometimes can get carried away with the emphasis: that is due to the fact that I am my father’s son.

When describing large amounts, such as cars on a road on a given moment, or people in an elevator, the number 40,000,000 comes out of my mouth. I’ve been doing that for all my life, and will continue t do so, so it seems. TLW (The Little Woman) pointed it out early in our marriage.

Dad had that habit and although his descriptions took on a different form, he got the same results.

One day I was eating an orange as a kid, and Dad asked:

“What’s that you’re eating?”

“An orange.”

“That’s an orange!?”

“Yeah?”

“Now when I was your age, we had orange this big!” Bring his two hands together to shape a sphere about the size of a large grapefruit.

“And that was just the pit” I added. He laughed at my compounded exaggeration and life went on.

The old story about walking to school all uphill as a child was one of his favorite to tell, yet it struck me as weird that he also walked uphill home too.

Sometimes Dad would get a side job painting someone’s home or office or billboard and take me along and he would pay slave wages, and I was grateful he was paying me at all.

“Now here is what WE have to do, he would announce to his captivated audience, his sole helper. See all the corners? I want YOU to take a broom and sweep out all the corners in the ceiling and run the broom along the edge where the ceiling meets the walls, and down the walls to the floors. Once WE are done with that then we can prime.”

Sometimes the we turned into WE, and suddenly the we are painting became the WE are painting in a hurry. He got a couple of hundred bucks, and I got five, we certainly worked hard for our money.

But Dad was no miser, no sirree, when he left me with the broom, he would run out and get a cup of coffee and bring me one back for free! I was usually done by the time he got back, so he must have traveled far for that coffee!