my dad is cool

I spoke to my dad earlier and he told me about this thing that happened the other day when he was hanging out with some guys from my parents crew of friends. What happened, basically, was that everyone but my dad somehow had heard that the college-aged son of one of the families in the crew had recently transitioned. My dad was aghast at the fact that somehow this had entirely gone over his head. He hadn't seen the kid in a bit, but had seen their father a few times, and everyone else in the friend group.

The whole thing was being treated especially delicately because their mother died of breast cancer in 2018 after putting up a long and admirable fight. So in the span of a year, the family lost the wife/mother and then began to deal with the eldest's transition. The dad was being really good about it, was the sort of party line. The eldest's younger sister on the other hand had taken the position that this was all a phase. 

Anyway, this was all really crazy; I haven't seen anyone in this family since the mother's funeral. I was glad to hear that the father was being cool about it, but I also felt sort of bad for him because what could possibly make him miss his wife more than navigating this whole thing solo.

But I guess why I thought to blog about this was because I really appreciated the way my dad talked about the whole thing. He said that he'd told another friend who hadn't yet heard about this, and this friend was like "do you think that all this gender stuff being in the news is encouraging kids to question themselves" and my dad was apparently like omg no if anything it just makes people feel safer and like there is a place for that conversation. It's just funny because I don't think of my dad as at all backwards or conservative but he is still technically a boomer. His frankness about the whole affair was like, charming in one way, like the way he was talking about it was just like "wow!" and he seemed happy that our family friend had support from their family. And it was cool that these boomer-age guys were just sitting around being like "tite" about their friend's kid transitioning. 

I have a great deal of faith in my dad, but he constantly surprises me in the ways that he makes good on that without prompting. When I was younger, his frank and consistent like...ethics-mindedness would often pan out as feeling pretty moralizing. For instance, one time in middle school I caught wind of a some popular boys' plot to send a weird girl a valentine with boogers in it. I told my dad about it, thinking it was so Crazy and Wow Wild Right, and he was appalled. He made me call the school office anonymously like I was intervening in a terrorist plot. I was mortified and resentful, but of course he was right to make me do it. Another example, less moralizing but more just illustrative of the kinds of thing he'd be into: for a few Christmases when I was in high school, he would make these gift bags for homeless people–like 100 of them with gloves and gift cards and stuff–and keep them in his car to hand out. Another example: Right after 9/11, my brother–4 or 5 yrs old at the time–said that 3,000 people dead didn't seem like that big a deal, so my dad made him count 3,000 pennies out of this massive jug the housekeeper would dump any found change into.

As we've both aged, his ethics feel less judgey and more matter of fact to me. In my adult years, I've done some things that are way worse than not telling anyone about the booger plot, and he's basically refrained from any wrist-slapping and just been like "so what are you going to do?" He usually knows what I'm going to do, and we often agree about what is right and about what is easy. But even when I take the easy way, he's pretty chill about it. However, I realized recently that I have a massive fear of him thinking that I'm morally bankrupt or baseline manipulative. So maybe I'm not unscathed. But the net effect is good because it's made me an awful liar; I basically never lie to him and I find it excruciating in most other situations.

My dad's massive commitment to "doing the right thing" probably comes from the fact that he almost got nabbed for a really bad thing that he had nothing to do with when he was younger than I am now. Like high level conspiracy charges. I think about that a lot; it's like now he's some perfect example of a kantian ethic - a genuine dedication to a categorical imperative born out of indebtedness to some unseen power, quite consciously not a God. Maybe I will re-read Kant to this end.

Anyway, talking to my dad on the phone is one of my favorite past-times. He is a really cool guy.