THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, June 14, 1996 TAG: 9606130184
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: OVER EASY
SOURCE: JO-ANN CLEGG
LENGTH: 86 lines
Father's Day, according to my encyclopedia, was started back in 1910 by Mrs. John Bruce Dodd of Spokane, Wash., a well-meaning but misdirected individual if there ever was one.
Although I never met - or even read about - the lady, I'm pretty certain of two or three things.
The first is that she was an accomplished club woman who knew how to get things done. The second is that she had a husband who knew how to compile a gift list.
The third is that I have nothing in common with her.
Thirty years after the fact I'm still wondering why the only fund-raiser I was ever asked to chair ended up losing $834.42 on a $500 investment. Worse still, nearly 38 years after I married him, Bill's gift lists still have only two items on them: shirts and underwear.
Each year at this time I entertain two thoughts. One is that Father's Day should be outlawed, the other is that I hope Mrs. Dodd is resting fitfully in a very warm climate.
It's not that I don't appreciate the father of my children. He's a great husband, a great dad and a super granddad.
What he isn't is a great person to buy a gift for.
Nor are most other men.
The way I see it, trying to figure out two gifts a year for the average man is difficult enough.
Coming up with a third is darned near impossible.
Especially if the man, like my Bill, already has a closet full of ties, a garage full of tools, 32 unread books on the coffee table, paid up subscriptions to all of his favorite magazines and a desk drawer full of gift certificates to restaurants.
Even more especially if the man doesn't wear cologne and after shave, doesn't have a hobby and considers a diet soda to be an exotic after-dinner drink.
For years I've been asking friends for gift suggestions.
Their answers have been . . . interesting.
``I can always buy my husband a fly,'' one told me.
``As in mosquitoes?'' I asked naively.
``No, as in what's used to land the most expensive minnow in the Commonwealth of Virginia,'' she replied.
Scratch that idea. Bill's sport fish of choice is a crab. His bait of choice is a piece of chicken that's been sitting in the sun on the back doorstep for a couple of days.
As a gift possibility it ranks somewhere between crankcase sludge and compost heap helper.
Someone else offered up the idea of sailing lessons. ``If it floats, it should have a motor,'' Bill once told me. I believe that was on the day that a dozen of us got becalmed on Long Island Sound in a wooden whale boat the size of Block Island and had to row back to the Merchant Marine Academy.
A couple of other discussions led to more interesting, if equally useless, gift ideas.
``What was your husband's gift last Father's Day?'' I asked yet another friend over lunch one day.
``He gave me a check for $500 to spend any way I wanted to,'' she sighed.
``No, I mean what was your present to him?'' I explained.
``That was my present to him, only he gave it to me so I wouldn't yell when he told me he had just given himself a new red Porsche for Father's Day,'' she explained.
``Lucky you,'' I told her.
``You mean the $500?'' she asked.
``No, I mean not having to pick out a present for him,'' I told her.
She agreed.
So did the wife of a local farmer I interviewed a while back.
The farmer himself started the story. It seems that he had bought himself a nice little bass boat early last spring. Several thousand dollars worth of bass boat, as a matter of fact.
The only problem was he couldn't figure out how to break the news to his wife. For weeks he kept it under wraps far back in a corner of an unused barn on their property.
``When I got up on Father's Day morning my wife handed me this beautiful card with a note in it,'' he told me. ``It said `Happy Father's Day from all of us. Your present is waiting for you out in the old barn where you've been hiding it since Easter.'
``Can't put anything over on that woman, that's for sure,'' he added, shaking his head.
``It was worth every penny he spent on it not to have to figure out what to buy,'' his wife chimed in.
I told her I agreed with her completely.
Then we toasted the late Mrs. Dodd with our Diet Cokes.
Dads, we agreed, needed to be honored. Even if it does keep us on our toes figuring out how to do it. by CNB