Dear Father, Dear Son

by Larry Elder

  “Why?”

  “There’s a reason why he is the way he is.”

  “There’s a reason why everybody is the way they are.”

  Dad made me stubborn and determined. He made Kirk the same way. After he left the restaurant, Kirk started working for an oil company in a refinery. Hard working and likeable, he was given more and more responsibility. After a few years, he made foreman with even brighter prospects down the road. He married a woman with two children, and they had another. He is happy. He complains sometimes about money, but not often.

  Because of Dad, he told me, he always wanted a family where the kids respected but actually liked their father. He intended to be the anti-Dad Dad.

  When it came to Dad, Kirk made peace with there being no peace between them.

  “You don’t know how long we’re going to have him,” I said. “If he dies and you haven’t tried, you’re going to have to live with that the rest of your life.”

  “I’ve lived with it so far.”

  When Kirk would visit their house, he spoke only to Mom. Dad would get “How about those Dodgers?” “I don’t know about the Lakers this year,” or, “It looks like rain.” And Dad would grunt back a couple of syllables.

  “Kirk, I just think you should try.” I said.

  “You could talk a monkey out of his last peanut. But stay out of this.”

  “Larry, have you talked to your brother?” Dad asked me a few weeks later. He never asked me about Kirk.

  “No, about what?”

  “Anythin’.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, he called and said he wanted to come over and talk.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “We had a long talk, the longest talk we ever had. And I was just wonderin’ if he said anythin’ to you.”

  “No, he hasn’t.”

  “Hm-m-m. Well, we had a long talk. Kind of cleared the air.”

  “That’s good, Dad.”

  “Yeah, it was. It really was. And you hadn’t talked to him.”

  “No, sure haven’t.”

  “Well, I’ll say.”

  Dad asked me to help him clean out the garage.

  “Time to get rid of all this useless old stuff.”

  I found an envelope in the bottom of a trunk. It was a letter that my dad, at age thirty-six, wrote to my older brother. Dad wrote it because he had a premonition that he would die at the age of thirty-six.

  “Why thirty-six?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, but that’s how long I thought I’d live.”

  “Well, you didn’t exactly nail that prediction.”

  He said he wanted to leave a list of the life lessons learned, to help my brother who was then two years old. He wanted Kirk to have a “road map.”

  I framed the original and gave it to my brother. A copy hangs on my living room wall.

  May 4, 1951

  Kirk, my son, you are now starting out in life—a life that Mother and I cannot live for you.

  So as you journey through life, remember it’s yours, so make it a good one. Always try to cheer up the other fellow.

  Learn to think straight, analyze things, be sure you have all the facts before concluding, and always spend less than you earn.

  Make friends, work hard, and play hard. Most important of all remember this—the best of friends wear out if you use them.

  This may sound silly, Son, but no matter where you are on the 29th of September, see that Mother gets a little gift, if possible, along with a big kiss and a broad smile.

  When you are out on your own, listen and take advice but do your own thinking, and concluding, set up a reasonable goal, and then be determined to reach it. You can and will, it’s up to you, Son.

  Your Father,

  Randolph Elder

  24

  DAD LIGHTENS UP

  We watched the Olympic heavyweight weightlifting event. When the weight got up to around 580 pounds, nobody could lift it. The athletes grunted and groaned. Everyone dropped the bar. No one pulled off a clean and jerk. A big, bearded Russian was up.

  “I think this guy has a shot,” Dad said.

  “Gee, I don’t know. Nobody else has come even close.”

  “I got a good feelin’ about this guy.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Wanna bet?” he said.

  “Okay, I’ll take your money. $5?”

  “Make it $20?”

  “$20? You’ve never bet that much before. After I win, you might have to get a job to pay it off.”

  “I don’t know. I’m feelin’ lucky.”

  The Russian powdered his hands. Then he bent down, grabbed the bar, and hoisted it over his head—a clean and jerk! The crowed exploded. A new world record!

  “Damn.”

  “Pay up, chump,” he said.

  I gave him a twenty. He rubbed it, snapped it a couple of times, and held it up to the light.

  “Looks real.”

  About an hour later, I saw the Los Angeles Times sports page on his bed. On the front page was a big color picture of the Russian weightlifter hoisting the barbell with the record-breaking weight. The caption read: “New World Record.” Dad and I had watched a tape-delayed event—whose outcome he’d read about that morning.

  “You cheated.”

  “How so?”

  “That was a tape.”

  “So?”

  “You already knew he’d do it!”

  “So?”

  “So it’s like you bet on a horse to win a race he’d already won.”

  “It’s not my fault you didn’t know it was taped.”

  “And you don’t think you should have told me?”

  “And lose out on $20?” he said. “What kind of chump do you take me for, chump?”

  “You could at least have the dignity to say you didn’t know it was taped.”

  “That’d be lyin’. I don’t lie, chump.”

  Kirk and I told Dad about a big “fight” party we went to where they showed a live championship fight. They passed a hat around. You put in twenty dollars and picked out a number from one to twelve. If the fight ended in the round of your number, you won part of the pot.

  One of the fighters was heavily favored to win, with experts predicting an early knockout, most likely in the third round.

  “Hey, give me twenty bucks,” Kirk said.

  I gave him the money and he picked the third round. I put in my twenty and picked a most unlikely round, the tenth. Damn!

  “C’mon, Kirk,” I said. “Trade rounds with me.”

  “No.”

  “Hey, you wouldn’t be playing at all if I hadn’t given you the twenty.”

  He laughed. “Screw you.”

  As predicted, the favorite wailed on the underdog in the first and second rounds. But the favorite failed to put him away in the third, and the tide started turning.

  By the middle rounds, it was clear that this was going to be a long night. By the seventh and eighth round, the momentum had shifted to the underdog. In the ninth round, the favorite was getting smacked around and barely made it back to his corner. Assuming the favorite answered the tenth round bell, he was finished. His cornerman frantically tried to get him ready to go back out.

  Kirk leaned over, “Can we still trade rounds?”

  “Screw you.”

  The favorite was knocked out in the tenth round. I won $240.

  “I don’t know what’s scarier,” Dad said. “That Kirk was stupid enough to ask you to trade. Or that you might have been stupid enough to do it. Either way, it’s bad.”

  We were in the breakfast room eating watermelon. Dad methodically cut a large half-slice into tidy, medium-large bite-size squares.

  “Why don’t you scrape the seeds off before you put the watermelon in your mouth, like I do?”

  “Takes too much time.”

  “Isn’t it more trouble to spit out the seeds?”

 
“Not to me.”

  Dad put a piece in his mouth, chewed, and spit the seeds onto his fork.

  “Do you know that you’re swallowing seeds?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “That chunk you just put in your mouth, it had at least a half a dozen seeds—and those are just the ones I saw from my side.”

  “And?”

  “When you spit out the seeds, only four came out. You are swallowing seeds.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I’ve been eatin’ watermelon all my life.”

  We counted the black seeds in the next chunk on his plate. There were eight visible on the outside, and maybe one or two more in deep, but eight at a minimum.

  He put the piece in his mouth, bit down, chewed awhile, and starting spitting out the seeds onto his fork. We counted them.

  “One. Two. Three. Four.” That’s it. He was done. No more seeds. He was shocked.

  “Eight minus four means you swallowed four seeds.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “So let’s do the math. You’ve been eating watermelon all your life. We add up the number of watermelons per year, times the number of years you’ve been eating them and, let’s see, that means you’ve probably swallowed over 100,000 watermelon seeds. That’s a lot of seeds. I’m amazed you can even have a bowel movement.”

  “All right, you two,” Mom said from next room. “That’s sick.”

  Dad and I were watching the news: “Turning to Hollywood, Elizabeth Taylor has finalized her divorce from her last husband, making a total of eight divorces …”

  “Dad, what do you think about that?”

  “What do I think about what?”

  “Elizabeth Taylor getting married and divorced eight times.”

  “I don’t think anythin’ about it.”

  “You have no opinion?”

  “Larry, it isn’t worth the energy to form one.”

  Dad and I were sitting at the dining room table when Mom came down the hall.

  “I smell something burning,” she said.

  Dad didn’t lift his head from his newspaper. “Maybe you’re walkin’ too fast.”

  One evening, my dad was in his chair watching the news as my mother sat on the couch mending something. The anchor talked about the latest man to join the craze of “streaking,” running nude down a public street.

  “You know,” Dad said, “I’m thinkin’ about takin’ up streakin’.”

  Mom stared at the fabric and tugged on the needle. “You won’t draw much of a crowd.”

  Dad now laughs all the time.

  25

  DAD’S NEW CAR

  Dad loves cars. He used to identify the make, model, and year until “those damn foreign things” started “poppin up.”

  “Dad, would you like a new car?”

  “For what?”

  “To have a new car.”

  “Don’t need one,” he said. Long retired, he occasionally drove to the store or to his Spanish classes.

  In 1955, he bought a green 1954 Mercury, our first “new” family car. He never bought a real new car. And he drove each car until it needed a root canal.

  “Dad, you’ve never had a new car. I want you to have one. I want you to know what a new car smells like.”

  “Okay, if that’s what you want.”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “I don’t want you takin’ on no debt.”

  “I won’t.”

  “The moment I feel too old to drive, that’s the day you come get the car. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  He wanted a Ford. He went from car to car, asking about mileage, maintenance, and trade-in value before selecting a white Ford Taurus. We caravanned home. In my rearview window, I saw him smile all the way back home, looking happier than a kid with his first puppy. We both did.

  He wouldn’t park it in the driveway. He parked it in front of the house.

  “That way I can look at it when I drink my coffee.”

  About a year later, an eighty-six-year-old man plowed into a bunch of shoppers at a busy outdoor farmers’ market in Santa Monica. Instead of pressing the brake, he mashed the accelerator. He killed ten people, including a seven-month-old baby, and injured more than fifty. “It was crazy,” one eyewitness said. “It was terrifying. There were bodies everywhere. He just kept accelerating. The screaming moved down the street in a wave.”

  Dad called me the day of the tragedy. “Come get this car.”

  “But you just passed your last driver’s test.”

  “I don’t care. Come get this car right now.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to think about it a little more? You’re still driving fine.”

  “I don’t care,” he said, “I’m not goin’ to let the same thing happen to me. Now, come get this car.”

  I took it back. It had less than eight hundred miles.

  “It’s the most beautiful car I ever had in my life,” he said. “But it’s better to quit too soon than to stay too long.”

  26

  DAD AND FRIENDS— LOST AND GAINED

  A side from my Uncle Thurman in Cleveland, my father truly liked and respected only one other man—Mr. Lusk. Mr. and Mrs. Lusk moved next door about two or three years after we moved to Haas Avenue. They were originally from Texas, but had come to L.A. in the late ’40s around the same time as my parents.

  They had no children. Mrs. Lusk wore no-nonsense sweaters, took the bus to work, and canned her own peaches. Mr. Lusk kept a garden where he grew cabbage, green beans, and onions. They had a small peach tree and also grew berries. Everywhere in his small back yard where it was humanly possible to grow something edible, Mr. Lusk found a way.

  Mr. Lusk reminded Dad of himself, and Mr. Lusk saw a mirror image in Dad. Both were Depression-era men. Both were no-nonsense, unpretentious, and direct. No excuses—life is what you make of it. No complaining—except when they complained about government, welfare, lazy people, and “good-for-nothin’ kids who ain’t got to do nothin’ but go to school and they won’t half do that.” What are the odds of two such people—two loners with no other friends—in a city of three million people moving next door to each other?

  Mrs. Lusk called her husband “Puddin.” We used to joke about it until my dad told us to cut it out. Mrs. Lusk worked for the city as a clerk of some kind. She left every morning at the same time, and returned home at exactly the same time every evening. Mr. Lusk worked for the railroads, something to do with switching the tracks so the right railcars hooked up with the right engines.

  The Lusks were frugal. They bought a new car only when the old one was on life support. Their home was sparsely furnished, and their garage neat, clean, and organized. They lived next door for some forty years.

  “How ya doin’, Mr. Lusk?” Dad said. The Lusks’ first names were Fred and Arletha. But the Lusks called my parents “Mr. Elder” and “Mrs. Elder,” and Mom and Dad called them “Mr. Lusk” and “Mrs. Lusk.”

  “Oh, can’t complain. If I did you wouldn’t listen.”

  “Well, 90 percent of people don’t want to hear ’bout your problems, and the other 10 percent are glad it’s you.”

  They’d laugh, exchange jokes, and complain about their wives. The wives retaliated and complained about their “good-for-nothin’” husbands.

  Mr. Lusk joked about my mother’s take-no-prisoners drive and referred to her as the “War Department.” Once, after Mom was promoted to supervisor at the phone company, she forgot her reading glasses. The company sent a lower-level employee to our house to pick up her glasses. Mr. Lusk came unglued.

  “So, War Department, you’re such a big wheel, you had some flunky come out and get your glasses. Bet you left them on purpose.”

  And if Dad got home early enough, he’d grab some vodka, open the Lusks’ back gate, and invite himself in for a drink.


  Mr. Lusk, an avid San Francisco Giants fan, loved baseball. I was never sure whether he was truly a Giants fan or whether he pretended just to annoy me. He taught me how to throw a curve ball. And even though our basketballs invariably went over the fence and crushed his onions, he never got mad.

  “Now, you boys watch your ball,” he said while tossing it back. “You’re ruining my crop over here. So try and be careful.”

  Mr. Lusk retired first. Dad kept promising, “This is my last year.” But he kept on working.

  “This time,” Dad said, “I mean it.” He was eighty-one and said he was giving it one more year.

  He and Mr. Lusk began planning the things they were going to do together. They would travel. They would maybe go fishing. They talked about taking in a Giants-Dodgers game. Most likely, though, they would just hang out and shoot the breeze.

  This time Dad was serious. He asked me to sell the business and the house next to it.

  “You take care of all the legal stuff. I assume you’ll give me a discount.”

  “No, I’m charging extra—aggravation tax.”

  Four weeks before Dad retired, Mr. Lusk died. His stomach had suddenly swollen. He checked into a hospital and within days, he was dead. My father was devastated.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. I’ll be damned.” He would now have a very different retirement.

  My friend, Donna, wanted me to meet her father who lived in Scottsdale, Arizona. Bill, her father, served in World War II on a combat ship and did some boxing in the Navy. When he came out, he worked as a metal spinner. He was tall, still muscular, with tattoos on each arm. He reminded me of John Wayne.

  “You mean what John Wayne wished he was,” said Donna. “My Dad is the real deal.” One day, she said, a bunch of young men were walking down his street drinking and yelling.

  “Keep it down!” Bill barked.

  “Mind your own business.”

  “This neighborhood is my business. Now keep it down or I’ll come over there and kick your ass.”

  He was then over seventy.

  “We gotta get them together,” Donna said. “Your dad reminds me of mine.”

  When Bill and his wife, Carol, came to L.A., Donna arranged for Dad and Bill to meet.