March 20, 2013

• Mr. Turtle is my father

  Yesterday afternoon I had just stepped into a musty basement full of cardboard boxes when I froze in my tracks and grew eyes as wide as eggs: I had just realized that two conversations I had had four months apart had almost the exact same structure.

  The first one happened in the fall when I answered the phone at our restaurant. I noticed that the area code was 614 (the area code for Columbus) and since I was having a mediocre shift I decided to ask what high school they had gone to, which is something I had never done before.  

  Philip: Oh, so what high school did you go to?

  Girl: I went to Bexley.

  Philip: Did you play soccer?

  Girl: Yeah actually I did.

  Philip: Oh, so you know Mr. Dempsey.

  Girl: That’s my dad.

  Even though he coached soccer in Bexley Mr. Dempsey was a history teacher in Hilliard where he was my European history teacher my junior year of high school. So the first time I had ever decided to ask an ol’ 614 where they were from, they turned out to be one of my teacher’s daughters. And I gave her an inside joke to carry on. (I said I still didn’t have his 100 Most Influential People of All Time book, which he had lying around in his classroom and I read during class. When it disappeared he blamed me because he claimed I was the only one who ever read it. It turned up later.)

  A few months later I became fascinated with the word Tucson on a shift and started saying it Tuck-son over and over again.  My manager heard me and said that his parents had retired and were currently in Tucson on vacation.

  Philip: Oh. What did your parents do?

  Eric: Well my mom was an administrative assistant in Dublin, and my dad designed and taught an industrial mechanics course in Hilliard.

  Philip: Industrial mechanics. Wow. What did he do, build atomic bombs?

  Eric: No, that just means shoppe class.

  Philip: Oh. Ok. Yeah, let’s see…I had Mr. Estell for shoppe class in 7th grade.

  Eric: That’s my father.

  (long pause as my startled brain assembled reality)

  Eric: My last name’s Estell…

  These conversation happened pretty far apart, so you can understand that it took my mind a few weeks to process it. But you can also see why I froze in that basement and grew eyes as wide as eggs. Both of these conversations happened at work, were about a teacher I had had, and ended with the punchline that they were the father of the person I was talking to. 

  To draw out the surprise I felt in these situations I was going to compare it to when Mary Jane kissed Peter Parker and realized he might be spiderman at the end of the first movie….but there are some important differences there.

  Coincidentally, I was just on facebook where a former xangan had posted a picture of a man from the 19th century with a huge white beard. She said it was Brahms and I said it looked like Tolstoy. A few minutes went by and then at almost the exact same second we both commented saying ‘No it’s DARWIN!!’  (Not those exact words…but we had the same conclusion.)

  The storal of this mory is that it’s really exciting to put two matching thoughts together. 

  • 3:32 pm
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