(My first Father's Day ... AFTER I cleaned my beard and changed my flight suit)
Your first Fathers Day doesn’t count unless it involves baby
poop all over, or about a pint of half-digested strawberry yogurt in your face.
My first Father’s Day coincided with my name appearing on the flight
manifest of a US Navy P-3 Orion patrol bomber, and a prospective long-ish
mission out over the Pacific Ocean. The
13 men (we were all male back then) of the bomber’s crew were all waiting around in
the time-honored military tradition of “Stand by to stand by.” That means we had to wear our flight suits
everywhere, keeping our helmets and survival gear close to hand...and then just sit around waiting for the call to launch the mission.
So there I was, at home, in my flight suit, sitting around with my
(then) toddler daughter, Johanna. We
were doing the “fly-like-Daddy Game” in which I lay on the living room floor,
and she latched onto my legs and hands, and I lifted her up yelling (what
else?) “Fly like daddy!”
This game never failed to bring gales of giggles from
her. Well, almost never.
On this day, Johanna had eaten almost a half-pint of
strawberry yogurt about a half-hour before our FLD game kicked off. Evidently it didn’t sit well with her.
Anyway, on about our 13th FLD takeoff, instead of
gales of giggles, Johanna made a sound like a piece of plumbing backing up, and
turned an interesting shade of green.
Then the half-digested yogurt came pouring out of her mouth,
straight down, onto my face and into my beard.
Her mom looked at me, with pink-colored goo dripping down my
face and onto my sorry mess of a flight suit, and (stifling a laugh, I’m sure)
wished me my first Happy Fathers Day.
And it only got better from there…but those are the
substance of other stories.
