Allaboshi Ficacious!

 
Phone Call

Well, of course I called my Dad today for Father's Day.  Much of the conversation was about my brother, a continuing source of worry to my Dad, to Ruth (my stepmother), to me and to my Mom when she was alive.  I don't want to tell the whole story here; in fact, I don't think anyone even knows the whole story.  Suffice it to say that Steve hasn't had a job as a computer programmer in years and years, currently works part time at Dillard's, and recently failed a course in nursing school.  Dad plays the tuition, and is understandably concerned.

Besides Steve, we talked about his Father's Day gift that didn't arrive on time (my Dad is very forgiving about such things), my new job, and Dad's opinion that when it comes to education and money and careers, I'm "doing it right."  There was no discussion of health issues (Dad is very healthy for his age), or of the lease at the railroad museum, or of the CPA exam I'm not studying for.   I didn't even mention my tribute to him in this journal this past Thursday.  It would only have embarrassed him.

Another thing we didn't discuss was the past.  There was no reminiscence about my childhood, or World War II.  My Dad likes to look ahead, not back.  A propos of Steve, Dad did mention in passing that he used to be in charge of educating thousands of adults at Syracuse University, "so I know it can be done."  I did it, finally, and Steve graduated on the first try back in 1972.  But Steve's further education isn't going as smoothly.  That was the extent of the reminiscing.

Still, there are things about Dad that I'd like to reminisce about.  Since I don't do it with him very often, you guys get to read about it instead.

Things My Father Told Me

When I was growing up, my Dad had a seemingly endless supply of silly stories, poems and expressions that he would drop into the conversation from time to time, for his own amusement and mine. One of them was an endless loop joke:

It was a dark and stormy night.  The Captain said to the first mate, "Tell us a story." And this is the story that the first mate told.  "It was a dark and stormy night.  The Captain said to the first mate...."

For the Fourth of July:

I've got a rocket,
In my pocket.
I have no time to stay.
Away she goes!
I burn my toes!
It's Independence Day!"

and

I asked my mother for fifty cents
To see the elephant jump the fence.
He jumped so high,
He touched the sky,
And he never came back 'til
The Fourth of July."

Except that once I memorized the latter poem, my dad made me laugh by pulling the old switcheroo:

And he never came back 'til
The fourth of August.

There was also a bit about Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced boy:

He walks!  He talks!  He crawls upon his belly like a reptilian monster!  And for just one thin dime, the tenth part of a dollar, you can see it all on the inside!

As I said, silly stuff.  He also had "Cantelope, I'm married," and "Lettuce have lettuce!" and other wordplay.  But my favorites were the nonsense words.  I don't know whether it's a real word, but a person who behaved stupidly might be called a stupnagel.  Other people had their thingamajigs and their whatchamacallits, but Dad told us to "put the fortescue on the ritaplat," or to pass him the scrangemafortis.  And from time to time, he'd tell us, "Don't be so allaboshi ficacious!"

I asked him about this last one a couple of times in recent years.  Turns out it's part of some longer nonsense that he picked up from his dad or something.  Unfortunately, I haven't managed to memorize the long version, so I can't pass it on.  I don't have a kid to pass it onto anyway.

But if YOU would like to start saying the short version, you have my permission!

Karen

Two Mealtime Stories About Dad

Weekend Assignment #64: Tell us about a moment with your dad that serves as an example of one of his best qualities. That would be a personal moment between you and dad.

Extra Credit: Pictures, naturally -- perhaps from right about the time you were born.- J.S. 
I'll do the picture explanations and a brief bio first, and then tell a few stories.  Like last week, I'll limit myself to two of them.

I've written about my Dad before, of course, and posted most of these pictures before.  How old do you figure I am in that first one?  If the answer is less than nine months old (and I was not a healthy infant, so I may have started off a little small), then this picture is from 1957.  The house was on York Road in Dewitt, NY, a couple of blocks behind Genesee Street. My dad, Dr. Frank E. Funk, was an assistant professor in the speech department at Syracuse University when we lived there.  In 1961 we moved to Manlius, and in 1965 he became assistant dean of University College at S.U.  By the early 1970s he was Dean of U.C., and Director of Continuing Education at S.U. 
Since "retiring" he's been president of the Wilmington Railroad Museum, a reader to the blind (on tape), and an elder and recording secretary at his church.  And oh, he's an N-scale model train hobbyist.  Dad and Ruth, my stepmom, have now been married longer than my parents were married to each other--and much more happily.  He still volunteers and travels, and works out every day when he's home.
The second picture is of Dad and me on vacation in 1971.  My brother Steve almost certainly took the picture.  It was a ferry ride, but I couldn't tell you whether it was in the Adirondacks or the Thousand Islands or someplace else.  Come to think of it, this was probably Cape Cod.  I took a whole roll of film that summer of Cape Cod architecture.

The third picture is from March, 2005, when Dad came to Tucson for my graduation from University of Phoenix.  My baccalaureate degree took 30 years from start to finish, including about a quarter century of being four incompletes short of a degree from Syracuse University in English Literature and Film.  One of my reasons for going back to school was so that my dad the educator could finally see his kid graduate.  A bad printout of this photo, taken after the ceremony by John with our then-new Canon digital camera, is currently on display inside one of my  three mousepads at work.  It's the one I actually use as a mousepad.

The last two pictures are from the same weekend as the graduation photo.  It's of my dad at Old Tucson Studio, sort of a combination movie set and theme park.  The little observation tower he's climbed up in is supposed to afford a good view of Old Tucson's arson-damaged steam locomotive.  Dad later snuck past the ropes for a closer encounter, as shown here.  Considering the grant proposals my dad has written to help restore a steam locomotive at the museum, the staff of Old Tucson need not fear for the safety of their train at the hands of my dad!

Okay, stories.  If you want light-hearted, read the first one and then skip to the end.
My mom was in and out of the hospital in the early 1960s with encephalitis and other medical problems. That may or may not be why she wasn't around the day I first read Green Eggs and Ham.  I liked the book a lot, and probably read it aloud to my dad. My dad then made green eggs and green ham for dinner that night.  I wasn't so sure the ham needed to be green, since it doesn't say so in the title, but Dad insisted.  He prepared the sliced ham and fried eggs with Easter egg food coloring.  He made sure I knew this so I wouldn't think there was something wrong with the food.  It didn't occur to me until tonight that he may have actually planned the meal rather than thrown it together on the spur of the moment.  What are the chances that we happened to have ham in the house as I read that book?

Fast forward about 40 years. This time, my mom wasn't in the hospital.  She was living in an adult care home.  It was Thanksgiving,  November 28th, 2002, the worst day of my life. I didn't know it yet, but my mom had less than three weeks to live.

There was something mysterious and awful going on in my mom's brain toward the end of 2002.  She was only half-conscious most of the time,  flopping like a rag doll  in my car or in her wheelchair, largely oblivious to her surroundings.  Medication changes may have made things worse, but it's impossible to know for sure.  There were lots of doctors and lots of tests, but no clear results.  I'd taken her to a cardiologist, a neurologist and a psychiatrist, an eye doctor, an orthopedist and an ear specialist, and to the hospital for an EEG--during which she had a seizure, while I was prearranging her cemetery plot a mile away.  But the worst day of all was Thanksgiving, the day of the horror show.
I was a few minutes late picking her up, and Rosa had to keep reassuring her that I was coming at all.  But when I served the meal I'd been cooking all day, Mom couldn't eat it.  She'd slowly move her fork toward the plate, and slowly bring it up again and put it in her mouth, almost invariably with no food on the fork.  She said she couldn't see the food.  She did this over and over, for about forty minutes.  I didn't hand feed her.  Maybe I should have, but I didn't.  I couldn't.  Then I went out to the car, and called my Dad on my cell phone.  He listened and was sympathetic.  He had no magic answers, but he was there for me, and the conversation helped me a lot. I can't remember whether I took Mom back to the adult care home or John did it for me.  But I remember crying on the phone with Dad.

Eighteen days later, my dad spent over $1100 to fly in for the funeral of a woman he'd been estranged from for 26 years, a woman who sometimes claimed to hate him.  He did it for me, and I was grateful to have him there.  He was wonderful.  It was great having a parent around who was still alive and well, still enjoying life, still taking care of himself, and still interested in my welfare (which my mom was, also, even at the end of her life). 

The following Mother's Day, my dad called me.  "I know this is the first Mother's Day since you lost your mom," he said, "and I thought it might be a little difficult for you."  How right he was--and how thoughtful and wonderful he was to call!

My dad's not perfect, of course.  Nobody is.  There were times when I was growing up that we didn't get along very well.  But when it's really counted, my dad's always been there for  me.

That's the end of my stories for today.  Remind me sometime to tell you about my Dad at the Louvre, the James Bond New Year's Eve, and about my dad being so allaboshi ficacious.

Karen

My Favorite Veteran

As Many Wars As People Who Were There
The Aging Lottery

Tags: Weekend Assignment, Dad, Mom, if AOL doesn't save my edit this time I shall be very angry

Liberation

Weekend Assignment #12: Thanks to time travel and invisibility, you can be on the spot for any important event of the last 100 years (1905 onward). Which important historical event do you choose? As a twist, if you actually were at an important historical event, you can't pick that one. Why? Because you were there already. What, you want to be there twice? Think of the paradox!

Extra Credit: Think of a piece of now-dated slang that should be brought back into circulation. Make it reasonably clean slang, please.

Um, am I allowed to invisibly jostle Lee Harvey Oswald's arm?  According to a The New Twilight Zone episode from the 1980s, saving JFK would probably result in World War III, but I'd like to give it a shot.  Ditto stopping Mark David Chapman from killing John Lennon.

If I'm not allowed to "put right what once went wrong,"  then I'd rather witness a happy event than a depressing one (naturally!).  In my lifetime, that includes the moon landings (I remember the first one, and I've seen Mission Control, with its clunky old computer terminals), the fall of the Berlin Wall, and, well, not much else, really.  I wouldn't mind watching JFK's inaugural speech live and in person. (But see below.)

A little farther back (ooh, Freudian!  I typed "father" instead of "farther"), 22 years before my personal lifetime, was the end of World War II. Since my dad was a POW in Germany, I'm more interested in VE Day (and the events leading up to it) than VJ Day.  The liberation of Stalag Luft 1 would probably have me in tears, though.  Those guys weren't terribly healthy by the time the the Germans moved out (late on April 30, 1945), the Russians arrived  (May 1-3, 1945) and the POWs were evacuated (about May 6-15, 1945).

Aww, the heck with it.  Even if it would make me cry, that's what I'd choose to see: the liberation of my dad.

Update: aside from forgetting the  Happiest Historical Event On Earth (but  Barb didn't!), I failed to mention a number of fun historical stops I wrote about in previous time travel tourism entries many months ago.  Chief among them: watching the Beatles on a Temporal Mystery Tour.  I did mention Disneyland in one of the entries, but only as a great place to shop in 1957.  Perhaps I can cheer myself up with such diversions once my dad is safely out of 1945 Germany.

Extra Credit: In keeping with the rest of this entry, I went looking for World War II era slang, but what I found was mostly about old equipment for killing people.  Even "Ace!" or "Aces!" (meaning "Great!") probably relates to flying aces (pilots who had shot down at least five enemy aircraft.)  Aw, the heck with it.  I could go with a Beatles era term like "fab" or "gear" or--wait a minute!  I've got it!  "Heck!"  People (other than me) hardly ever seem to use that any more.  They go for the stronger stuff.  But I prefer the relatively inoffensive substitute.

Karen

Photos:  left, a photo from Stalag Luft 1 in Barth, Germany.  From the collection of A J Zywiczynski. Copyright 1999 www.b24.net; used without permission.  But doesn't that guy look like the man in the picture on the right?  That's my dad with my mom in 1949. Photographer unknown.  One of the photos would have to be reversed to make the hair match, but otherwise, that's got to be him, don't you think?

As Many Wars As People Who Were There

My Favorite Veteran

My Favorite Veteran

I can't let Veteran's Day to go by without mentioning my dad, Dr. Frank E Funk. Born 21 February 1923 in Jersey City, he's still alive and well, still active in church and community in Wilmington, NC.

I don't know that much about his service career (he doesn't talk about it much), but here's what I do know:

1. He was a navigator in the U.S. Army Air Force, before the Air Force was a separate branch of the service. He served on a B-17 Bomber. I should know what country he bombed and where he was shot down, but I don't remember. Austria? Italy? These are not events he remembers fondly.
2. He was a P.O.W. in Stalag Luft 1, where he cut other prisoners' hair. Because of his parents' German heritage, he spoke just enough German that he once managed to talk German captors out of killing a fellow prisoner, according to my mom. The camp was liberated by the Russians in May, 1945.
B24.net/pow/stalag1.htm
George Simmons Stalag Luft 1 page
Stalag Luft 1 Online - Barracks listing

3. After liberation of the camp, Dad spent time in a V.A. hospital regaining his strength. Then he went to college at Syracuse University. He met my mom in the Corner Store, a University-area hangout where the Newhouse School of Public Communications now stands. They were married in 1949, divorced in 1976. Dad remarried shortly after that, and is still happily married to Ruth Christy Funk to this day.

I called him today for Veteran's Day. which amused and pleased him. He said that he'd never joined any veterans' organizations because "I'm not one of those people who think of their years in the service as the most important time in their lives." Looking at all my dad has accomplished since then, I have to agree in his case. Professionally, he was a speech professor, assistant dean and then dean of University College (and Director of Continuing Education) at Syracuse University. Since retiring he's been a reader on tapes for the blind, a volunteer and board member at a local NPR station, president of the local railroad museum and an elder and recording secretary at his church. He's still active at the railroad museum and at church, and is just as annoyed as I am about the election. "The voters in this country could have benefited from taking your critical thinking course before this election," he told me today. That's my dad!

Karen
Musings: The Aging Lottery