I miss my father.

Once in a blue moon he would pull something off the wall from out of nowhere and put one right smack dab into the X-ring.

Once we were watching an old western and there was the obligatory woman has a baby scene and of course, the womenfolk assigned the expectant father the job of boiling water.

I asked my father how come they always ask the expectant father to boil water when a woman is having a baby.

He looked at me and laughed.

“To keep the Old Man from being a pain in the ass and getting in the way,” he chuckled. “It keeps him busy and out of the way of the woman folk who know what they are doing.”

When you think about it, that makes a lot of sense and it is one of those dumb little things that has been stuck in my head for well over 40 years.

I worked with another guy out here for years and once in a while I would be doing something and he would come out to help at just the wrong time. Two people would just screw things up, and yet he wanted to help.

I would sometimes tell him to go boil water. He would flush a little and shuffle off and do something else.

The first time I told him this he actually did go and get out a pot and boil water. When he had a big pot of water was at a rolling boil he came out and asked me what I needed a pot of boiling water for.

It put me in one hell of a spot to explain to him that I simply wanted him out of the way. I was tactful and he got over it. It became one of our little buzzwords to explain that the job at hand was a one man job.

Right now there is an expectant father’s waiting room in most hospitals. Men pace the floors there, get in the way, keep bugging nurses and are generally a pain in the ass. I’d just bet that when a woman has a husband that is out of town or overseas when the wife gives birth that the doctors and nurses rejoice because there is one less pain in the ass to deal with.

Maybe they ought to take a cue from the old westerns and install a stove and sink in the expectant father’s waiting room and just have the expectant father boil water.

It seems to work well in the westerns.

A couple of months later I ran the idea of installing a sink and a stove into the waiting room by my father and he laughed himself silly.

“Best idea you’ve had yet,” he said.

About a year later, my baby sister was born. Unbeknownst to all of us, during the last couple of weeks of my mom’s pregnancy, he kept an electric hot plate and a big pot hidden in the spare tire well of the family Dodge Station wagon.

He had made sure the cord was long enough to reach an outlet 8 feet away.

After he had gotten my mother in to the hospital and in the hands of the people there, he returned to the car and hauled the hot plate and pot into the waiting room.

When some passing nurse asked what he was doing with the hot plate, he told her this was his 5th kid and he had smartened up. He was going to boil water ‘like they do in the movies’ so he wouldn’t make a pain in the ass of himself.

While the old man plugged in the hot plate, a very amused nurse filled up the pot for him.

While my mother was in the delivery room, my father boiled water.

I guess some of my outlook in life comes from my father.

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Of course, that was back in the dark ages when the world had a sense of humor. Today anyone that tried that would be carted off.

The world has sure changed over the past few decades and I am not too sure I like it very much.



my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/