Read Online Tales from the Dad Side by Steve Doocy - Free Book Online Page A

the pretty lady marry the guy with the gut? I’d wonder years before I learned he was worth three-quarters of a gazillion dollars, and as I now know, vast wealth is very slimming.
    My father gave me permission and a pile of unused lumber to set up a dry dock in the basement of our ranch house on Margaret Street in Russell, Kansas. A third-generation do-it-yourselfer, I used what I’d observed in the movie as the inspiration and general concept for the raft. There was one gigantic problem with me building that thing: I was only seven years old. As I look back, the State of Kansas Department of Transportation should have come to our house and arrested my dad on the spot because having a second grader build a watercraft clearly fell into the category of unwise things that should never be attempted, like singing karaoke sober.
    I cobbled together as simple a flatboat as you could imagine, a wooden platform on a couple of two-by-fours. This was the first time I’d ever constructed something from scratch, and my father had encouraged me to add some extras. I chose something neither my father nor Tom Sawyer had on his raft: a steering wheel. That would make it much easier for me to navigate around partially submerged tree stumps as I spent lazy afternoons floating downstream. When I turned the primitive wheel side to side nothing happened. It wasn’t hooked to anything and didn’t really work, because a seven-year-old with a hammer has the mechanical wherewithal of a raccoon.
    With the assembly complete, it was time for the final flourishes. I plugged my wood-burning iron into a basement plug and waited twenty seconds for it to heat up to nine thousand degrees, then branded the boat with a name that would surely be the envy of every second-grade boy: Kon Stinki .
    During the final construction phase the excitement of my project had spilled over into a conversation with some school chums, who a few days later dropped by unannounced for a viewing. I wasn’t ready to officially unveil it, so I did the adult thing and hid behind the water heater pretending I wasn’t home. But my grandma was and told them to take a peek in the basement window. When I heard giggling, I assumed it was “That is so cool” laughter, but it was followed by “And look at that dorky steering wheel!” Another added, “Idiot,” as they adjourned to spread more goodwill around the neighborhood and doubtless torture a cat with a red-hot poker.
    For the first time in my young life I felt absolute humiliation. Getting your pants pulled down between classes was one thing, but this was personal. It was my own creation—why didn’t they understand that? Rejected, dejected, and generally feeling rotten, I mothballed the project. My father arrived home in time to watch the final fifteen minutes of The Mike Douglas Show, but my mom confided what hadhappened and he went directly to the basement, where I was using a pry bar to rip the pine plank captain’s chair out of the SS Laughing-stock .
    â€œWhatcha doing?”
    I told him I’d decided not to finish it, because it was a stupid idea.
    â€œLemme see that hammer,” he said, and in that magic dad way, he helped me put things back together on my raft and in my heart. “It looks seaworthy to me. Let’s plunk it in water.”
    Instantly I forgot my previous heartbreak and started planning the maiden voyage. Lazy rivers are in short supply in western Kansas, but there are plenty of cow ponds, and my dad secured permission from one of his farmer friends to float my boat. When we arrived I personally thanked the landowner for the use of his lagoon, and I quickly discovered why my father nicknamed him Van Gogh—the man could talk your ear off.
    Van Gogh, my dad, and I carried the raft from the trunk of my father’s T-bird down to the water’s edge. I just listened as the chatty farmer in the OshKosh overalls said things like