Finding an appropriate greeting card is a tricky proposition at best, and in recent years Father’s Day has become one of the most treacherous of all Hallmark Moments. Nearly every card on the shelves falls into one of two camps, with little in between:

GROUP ONE: “O Saintly Father, your Christian charity and homespun wisdom bring tears to my Christ-bless’d eyes, for as I walk through this world as one of God’s Soldiers, your beatific countenance serves as a perfect inspiration of intelligence and integrity. Let us join hands and weep as one, for the eternal bounty that the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, whose teachings you have imbued into my soul as if they were your own. You are truly the wind beneath my wings.”

GROUP TWO: “Hey, Happy Father’s Day, you big fat fartin’ dummy! You look like a big ol’ fartin’ monkey, sitting your fat ass in your favorite fartchair, watching NASCAR, drinking beer until you pass out! Try not to fart too much! Also give me some money, ha ha!”

These cards are great if your father is Charles Ingalls or Homer Simpson. For everyone else, the greeting card industry had no time for you.

As I imagine is the case for many readers, my father lies somewhere in the middle. My father is not the living embodiment of Christian Virtue, nor is he an oafish fart machine. So paying him tribute on Father’s Day can be difficult. I hope this story does him justice.

Brief preface: Last month Isley visited New York as part of the What is Best in Life East Coast
Tour. As you may have read in his recap, or seen via the wonders of online photo sharing, he and I engaged in a spirited Scientific Beer Tasting. We tested a wide variety of beers, many of them dating back to 1995. Some of you may wonder why we had beer lying around that dated back to the first Clinton administration, a time when neither of us were anywhere near the legal age to drink it. It was because of my father’s Beer Fridge. For as long as I can recall, my parents’ home has had a second refrigerator dedicated to beer. It was usually full of prosaic brews like Coors Light, Yuengling, Sam Adams, or Stegmaier, but as my father has an adventurer’s palate it accumulated a wider variety of oddball bottles, the leftovers of myriad experimental six pack purchases. When my parents sold their New Jersey home to move to China by way of Florida, the Beer Fridge was dissolved, and many of these beers (like so many other things) found their way to my apartment.

Why, beyond the obvious reasons, did my dad so diligently curate a Beer Fridge? The answer, as well as my very existence, dates back to The Blizzard of 1978.

At the time, my parents were relative newlyweds, recently relocated to Worcester, Massachusetts. My father was a rising star in the shoe business, having made the leap from retail manager to assistant buyer in the corporate offices. My mother worked at a bank, and both were on the job when The Blizzard hit. My father’s offices closed early enough that he made it home safely, but the bank tried to stick it out, leading to my mother’s car getting stuck in a snow bank as she attempted to drive home. While she was close enough to a friend’s home to find shelter, the storm had knocked out electricity and phone lines in many areas. My father, unable to locate my mother beyond her initial phone call saying she was headed home, began to walk the route between the bank and their home in the hopes of finding her, freezing one eye shut in the process. When he returned home to defrost himself, my mom managed to get him on the phone and let him know she was fine. Stranded across town, but fine.

For the next two days, my father was stranded at home, alone and often without electricity. As a struggling young couple, they didn’t have much in the way of provisions, and he almost immediately ran through their stock of alcohol. In this moment of desperation, he turned to Billy Beer, the famously terrible product endorsed by the then-Hillbilly-Brother-in-Chief and Libyan Foreign Agent Billy Carter.

At the outset of The Blizzard, my father possessed a case of Billy Beer, presumably the result of a gag gift or a moment of ironic kitsch. By Blizzard’s end, only two cans remained. Those two cans are still in my father’s possession, a physical reminder that he would never allow a situation like this again.

Also by Blizzard’s end, the roads cleared enough that my mother was able to find her way home, and was joyously reunited with my father. Almost exactly nine months later, I was born.

I eventually learned that not many people get told the circumstances of their conception. But it never seemed odd that my father would be willing, even proud to relate it to me. That’s one of those Middle Ground lessons my dad taught me: if a story’s good enough, go ahead and tell it. This particular good story has other life lessons embedded in it:

1. My father doesn’t give up, especially on the people he cares about, even if it means his eye is going to get frozen shut.
2. My father learned the hard way about the value of preparation. When the Blizzard of 1996 hit, he had plenty of beer and other provisions in the home; including some of the beer Isley and I drank last month.
3. My father knows that in a tough situation, you have to make due with what’s on hand; sometimes that means drinking Billy Beer. Sometimes it means switching from beer to shots so you won’t have to urinate and lose your spot at a packed concert. Other times, such as right now, it means working in China and only being able to communicate with his family via Skype, one of the few social media sites the Great Firewall has not decided to block.

I understand that the greeting card industry cannot be too specific with their targeting. I know the market for a “Hope You’re Doing Well Literally Halfway Across the World on Father’s Day, Wish You Could Be Here Drinking By a Bonfire Talking About How Great Breaking Bad Is” card line would sell, at maximum, two copies. But it would be nice if there were a few more cards in the middle ground. I’m pretty sure I can only get away with blogging about my conception story as a card substitute once.

The Food I Love to Hate

Taken from Stories Galore! by C.R. Eckert. Topeka: American Binderies, 1987 edition. 1/1.

1. Lobster
2. Grapes
3. Onions
4. Ham
5. Frog Legs
6. Lima Beans
7. Green Beans
8. Spinich
9. Apple Sauce
10. Pineapple
11. Lamb
12. Shushi
13. Fish
14. Pear
15. Oysters
16. Cherries
17. Oatmeal (sorry, Gonzo)
18. Liver Oil
19. Prune Juice
20. Cantalope
21. Caviar
22. Hot Peppers (drawn with flames surrounding words)
23. Cailflower