I was just in the middle of a comment battle with someone who doesn’t believe some of the things that I said about my father (in conjunction with a video about racism in the military…)

On the one hand – it is kind of infuriating to have someone flat-out accuse me of lying about my dad… especially when I didn’t.

On the other hand – I can see why a person wouldn’t believe some of my little quips about my dad; he was a really strange guy and did things that don’t always sit comfortably in day-to-day life. That’s not to say that he walked around with a tin-foil hat or made the sign of the Cross when speaking (he only did that while driving past churches…)

Dad was strange because he was so very, very normal. He didn’t have much of an education, only four years of formal schooling. He was apprenticed to a woodworking shop when he was seven and THAT was the foundation of his real education. After he immigrated to the United States in the 1950’s he started working right away (as in he arrived in New York on a Monday, drove up to Boston on Tuesday and had his first job making caskets on Wednesday).

The workshops that he worked in had lots of other people from lots of other parts of the world. Consequently, his English never got that polished, but he was suddenly able to speak Spanish and Portuguese on top of his native Italian. (I have to admit that it was really weird to watch dad talk to folks in his other languages… it was like watching a movie where the movements don’t track with the sound!)

Back to the point!

My initial point was that my dad would sometimes say weird things that seemed completely improbable … but as he was a person who didn’t tell lies (he did like to play tricks – those aren’t exactly lies but if we’re splitting hairs I guess it represents a certain verifiable level of mendacity.)

One night we were in the kitchen eating dinner dad pointed to the TV and said “I know that man!”

“Dad … you know Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn???” Thinking that it was about as probable as it was for him to have that night’s winning lottery numbers.

”I made some furniture for his office when he lived in Vermont.”

I always get a kick out of that story. It shows perfectly how bad it is to serially UNDERstate the things you do in front of people while at the exact time showing how wrong it is to automatically disbelieve things that fall 5 or more degrees off-center. I should have known it was true – dad wasn’t a liar. I also should have know it was true based on some of the other prestigious woodworking ‘gigs’ he went on in his career.