Daddy-Trapped

When I was a little boy, my father used to come home from work in the evening and my sister and I would clamor up at his exhausted frame to play a game with us. And he would. He would sit on the couch first, a sagging and rough 70's sort of couch with atrocious brownish burlap upholstery. He would sit in the seat that he always would sit in and put the mail down on the lamp-table combination that stood to his right, and he'd play Daddy-Trap with us.

Daddy-Trap, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the game, consists of running past a man who knows when and how fast you'll be running past him and getting caught and tickled mercilessly. Then, my father would good-naturedly mock the way we laughed. "Hill hill hill", he'd say, "hill hill hill." Apparently that's what our laughter sounded like.

And so, we played Daddy-Trap. I didn't realize what Daddy-Trap REALLY was though. In a way, I'm still in a Daddy-Trap. I've fallen into the trap of behaving like my father. It always starts with observation. I grew up observing this man, of course I'm going to pick up a few of his mannerisms. Slowly, as I matured, it progressed to giving each other high-fives for particularly bad puns. Now, this slow and cancer-like Daddy-Trap in which I've been caught dictates the way I sit, the way I speak, the crappy jokes that I tell, and the way I respond to everything. Between my brother and I, we've more or less ensured that my father won't die. At least not in spirit. The two of us are too much like him. My father will live in the same way that any toilet humor is greeted with an "Ah, Grandpa Ed lives" by my mother.

Not that I'll necessarily out-live my father. The crazy bastard went on a 40 mile bike ride today and I was puffing going up 3 flights of stairs.

True Story.