Father's Day Greetings!

Drink A Toast To Dad!

It’s amazing how smart my father gets as I age! Well, okay, I guess it is me that is learning, not him, but things that made no sense to me when I was a kid now make brilliant sense!

My brothers and I, for example used to “Shave” with daddy. We weren’t “allowed” to do so that often at home, but it became a big game every time we were out camping. Summers we’d drive across the country and stop at campgrounds in some of the neatest locations. Each morning, my brothers, my Daddy and I would head down to the bathhouse in the campground and perform our morning ablutions. The routine was invariably to shave then shower and then dress in the clothing Mommy had sent down with us to wear for the day.

Dad would let us slather huge gobs of shaving cream all over our face and then scrape it off with an empty safety razor. This usually ended with all of us completely covered head-to-toe in shaving cream. We’d throw it at each other, we’d get it into each other’s hair, slap each other with gobs of it in our hands to watch it explode all over the place, and that sort of thing. We looked like three miniature snowmen trundling off to the shower stalls after shaving.

I realized the ulterior motive in this when I heard my Dad explain to my baby brother that he should let my nephew “shave.” The discussion came up because my nephew like all little boys, I guess, had developed an aversion to soap. Dad explained that shaving cream, is mostly soap. What a revelation! It now all makes sense. Thinking back, Dad always made sure that we’d wipe really well getting the shaving cream off once we were in the shower.

You’d think that Dad himself might have been a little boy once…