No, MY Dad , of the Titanium Hips

My Dad’s an over-achiever. I mean, any way you care to gauge the over-achieverness of a person, my Dad qualifies. The most recent incarnation of his insatiable ambition has come in his early release from the hospital less than two days after a hip replacement surgery.

My Dad’s way too young to be having a hip replaced (he’s only 48), and way, way too young to have had both hips replaced in the span of a year, but throughout the years he refused to stop playing sports like racquetball and basketball at the urging of doctors, so now he’s got titanium hips to show for it. He doesn’t mind too much. My Dad’s a glass-is-half-full kind of guy.

So anyway, he was doing so well with his physical therapy exercises following the surgery that they told him to just go home. My parents hadn’t gotten around to telling me this yet, so I was a bit surprised this evening when I called the hospital and asked for room #8, as instructed by my Mom.

“Hello?” an unfamiliar voice said.

“Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh, I think I got the wrong dad.”

“Is this Kendra?”

“No, this is Kisa. Close.”

“Oh, you sounded like one of my daughters.”

“Sorry to disturb you,” I said. “Have a good night.”

I called the hospital switchboard again. “Yeah, I just called and asked for room #8, and I got a dad, but he wasn’t my Dad.”

She looked him up and told me he’d been discharged, so I called my parents at home for the details. All went well, all’s looking good. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a parent in surgery, but it’s very relieving when you hear that all went well. You just never know—even the most routine of surgeries can go horribly afoul.

After I talked to my Dad for a while, I hung up to let him get some rest. Then, as I stood in the bathroom, drying my hair in preparation to go out, I started to think about Kendra and her father.

How sad—I thought—that this man thought his daughter was calling when she really wasn’t. I mean, his voice sounded genuinely happy to hear from me, even though I wasn’t the me he thought I was. I started to hope very strongly that Kendra would call her Dad. C’mon, girl, I thought. Get off your ass and call your father. He’s in the hospital, for cryin’ out loud!

All sorts of scenarios went through my mind. What if Kendra and her father are estranged and he was hoping beyond all hope that his brush with death and subsequent hospitalization would bring her around to reconcile? He has grandchildren he’s never even met. He’s never even seen the home she and her (cockamamie) husband built, gosh, was it already four years ago? For shame.

I’m sure the father in room #8 and his daughter Kendra are just fine. I have no reason at all to think otherwise. But it’s the slight possibility that they’re not fine that made me appreciate—as I curling-ironed the ends of my hair—what an amazing father I have and how lucky I am to have him.

My Dad has set the standard pretty high for my potential mates. He's intelligent, hard-working, fair- and open-minded, generous, fun, and always, always working to learn new things and become a better person. And he's never been lazy a day in his life. Men like this are rare, and they make wonderful fathers; I can't help but compare the men I meet to him and look for these qualities. I just wanted to take a minute to appreciate him and to wish him a strong and rapid recovery, publicly.

Thank you for everything, Dad. May you enjoy your rest.

Textured walls (Austin, TX) are fun to touch

Between A and B is a Three-Toothed Mechanic Named Anna

I have incredibly good fortune where cars are concerned.

A friend once gave me her 1969 VW Bug when she and her boyfriend bought a new car. That little bug rumbled its way to De Anza College for 2 quarters before it finally retired itself with one final poof of non-regulated exhaust fumes, sputtering to a stop in front of my apartment building. I had transferred to San Jose State University (2 blocks from my house) by then, so all was good when the tow truck came to take it off my hands.

My current vehicle was similarly bequeathed. Three years ago, a friend of mine from Barnes & Noble told me his friend had bought a new car and was looking to gift his old one to a needy candidate.

So it was I came into the possession of a 1993 Suzuki Swift.

“Swift?” you say.

Never heard of it? Neither had I until I owned one. It looks exactly like a Geo Metro. The absolute tiny whiteness of it has earned it the name “Tic Tac,” and one of my coworkers’ favorite pastimes is making fun of its utterly ridiculous nature. (I like to think they’re just jealous).

Sure, it’s a deathtrap…a bloody mangled wreck just waiting to, begging to happen. But it gets me from A to B.

And it has no major structural problems.

There are, however, two functional problems with my Swift. The first is rather unfortunate because it happened at the hands of a friend who was trying to help. When I first obtained the car, it needed new brakes. This friend volunteered to help change them but in the process broke my door handle. So for the past 2 ½ years I’ve had to roll down the window and reach out to open the car from the outside when I get out. I don’t mind this; it actually gives me a humbling chuckle when I have to do it in front of people.

The real problem is that my car doesn’t idle. This means I have to put it in neutral at stops or it will stall.

At least that was the case until a month ago when I was rear-ended by a deranged holiday shopper near the mall. Miraculously, my rinky dink car showed no signs of damage on the outside. In fact, the only evidence that I had been hit (aside from the frighteningly loud crashing sound) was that my old school anti-theft radio (the kind you have to physically pull out of the console and take with you) flew out and landed in my lap.

But the best part of getting rear-ended was that it actually somehow fixed my idling problem. Now I can stop and sit at a red light for at least 2 minutes before the shaking begins and the car calls it quits.

Still, though, my car has begun to run poorly.

I thought an oil change would be a good idea. So I took the car to Jiffy Lube last week, where the young fellow taking down the car’s vital stats asked me questions that made me smirk in owner-sanctioned entertainment at the expense of my car.

“Suzuki Swift?” he asked. “Do you happen to know if that’s a 1.3 or 1.6 liter engine?”

I glanced at the back of the car, where stick-on numbers read “1.3”

“Um,” I said, knowing well that a 1.3 liter engine is just half a step above a moped, “I’m not sure. Do you think that 1.3 on the back means anything?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that would be 1.3.”

“Now,” he added, “this is your air filter. It’s black here, and that’s bad. It can affect your gas mileage.”

“Oh,” I said, “you mean I’ll no longer be getting 45 miles per gallon? That’s gonna suck.”

They replaced that for an added 13 bucks. The sad part was when the girl who rang me up explained the other service they’d performed.

“We checked your tire pressure,” she said, with thinly masked, well-deserved disdain for people like me. “You had some serious problems there.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Your tires are supposed to be at 35 pounds. One was at 54, one at 43, one at 19, and one at 14.”

Ouch. Dad, if you’re reading this, don’t kill me. And I’ve sinced figured out that my average tire reading between the four of them was 32.5 pounds. Only 2.5 pounds off…not too shabby.

Anyway, the car’s been acting up all week, post-oil change, and today it stalled on the road and wouldn’t start again, leaving me to finally make use of my AAA membership.

My savior was a sparsely-toothed, contracted mechanic woman named Anna…boy did she know her stuff. She got me started and back on the road in about 10 minutes, adding that it would be a shame for me to have to pay the $10/mile it would have cost if she’d ended up having to tow me.

There are some honest mechanics out there, it seems.

But anyway, my fear is that I will—Anna or no Anna—be needing to invest in alternate transportation options soon. That’s a painful thought, mostly because I’m trying to save money right now and a car was not what I had in mind to spend it on.

Still, though, I do have good luck in this category. My most ambitious hope is that the Tic Tac will hold out for another 100K or so. But if the Swift decides to put itself to sleep, I’ll be prowling Craigslist for another piece of crap that oh-so-gracelessly traverses the space between A and B.

I just love a car with character.