Hi, this is Frank Flaherty. Welcome to Brooklyn, that highly overhyped part of NYC, for another weekly episode of “Dad, Interrupted.”
“Dad, Interrupted” is a newsletter where I describe, in lighthearted, modestly embroidered stories, my misadventures as a family man. The cast includes my wife, my kids, my friends, my in-laws and the assorted chuckleheads I bump into.
This week, I’d like to explore rightness and wrongness. Not moral rightness and wrongness, but something far simpler: Factual rightness and wrongness. The nub of it is this: I remember, when I was in my early to mid-twenties, my father saying things I knew were wrong. When we were fishing one time, for example, he said it’s okay to toss empty soda cans overboard because they’d just dissolve in nature.
Sometimes I’d correct him when he said things like this, and sometimes not. But in either event the days when Dad’s words were gospel to me were over.
Well, I think I reached that same stage of fatherhood in the 20teens, when my kids were the same age I was when I started noticing my father’s mistakes.
The question is, Why did this happen, first to my father and now to me? There are several possible answers. Most of them are unpleasant and bump up against scary topics like senility. But I put those aside. I believe parents make more mistakes as they age because they have accumulated so many facts, so many dates and words and names and addresses and memories over their many, many years of life, that it’s hard to keep it all straight.
I look at it this way: To lug around the complete Oxford English Dictionary, all 20 volumes and 273,000 words, is way harder than to carry Merriam-Webster’s dictionary of basic English, which is just one volume and has just 36,000 words. I know so much by this stage of life that it’s hard to keep it all in order.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
My most vivid memory of being wrong was a debate over meat. But as my family will insist on telling you, there are many, many other examples of my being incorrect.
This week’s story is called “Dad Facts.”
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The Thanksgiving menu had been all sorted out — no to stuffed peppers, yes to barbecued shrimp, and yes to grated parmesan in the mashed potatoes. Now, as we all relaxed in the living room, the talk naturally circled back to food.
“We generally eat pretty healthy,” I told Eugene, Clara’s then-boyfriend. “Hardly any red meat, just fish and white meat — things like chicken and pork.”
“Dad,” said Clara, “I don’t think pork is a white meat.”
I smiled at her benignly. Clara’s in her early 20s at this point, and she knows a lot about nutrition, but as a dad I knew that this was a teachable moment.
“Yes, it is a white meat, honey,” I said, telling her that pork is also known as “the other white meat.” Of course that slogan was born long before my millennial daughter was, so how would she know?
Clara was still skeptical. So I Googled the question and read out loud the first answer to pop up. It came from someone named Karen.
I quote: “The amount of myoglobin in animal muscles determines the color of meat,” Karen wrote. “Pork is classified as a red meat because it contains more myoglobin than chicken or fish.”
Who is this “Karen” anyway? I wondered. She doesn’t sound like an expert. Then I saw that WebMD, the Los Angeles Times and Quora all agreed with “Karen,” as did everyone else in the first 37 pages of Google search results that I clicked through.
Since then I have been wrong many, many times. So many that Clara has put a label on my mistakes. She calls them “Dad Facts.”
Most of my “Dad Facts” are immediately swatted down by my wife and two children.
“Remember when we saw that flea circus in Montreal?” I’d say.
“No.”
“No.”
“No.”
“In that kids’ museum we went to there?”
“Nope.”
“Nope.”
“Nope.”
“We didn’t go to any kids’ museum in Montreal, honey,” says Jeanette. “Maybe you read about it and thought we might go there?”
I vehemently disagree. They must have been distracted by something else, like those french fries with gravy they ate gallons of in Montreal.
But still, I am apparently wrong a lot. I really hate being wrong about manly, father-type things, the kind of stuff most married men know.
For example, one day I was in the middle of a shower and, not for the first time, the shower curtain and rod detached from the wall, and water sprayed all over the place. I then proceeded to sop up the water that splashed on the floor and the toilet.
The mishap has also doused “Hillbilly Elegy,” a book which propelled J.D. Vance into the U.S. Senate. I was reading this book, but I was actually glad it got waterlogged because it is an awful book. Absolute drivel.
Anyway, I get dressed and go downstairs and say to Jeanette, “I need to go to the hardware store to get new shower rod sockets.”
She looks confused. I explain what happened.
“Oh,” she says. “Good luck. When you get to the hardware store, you may want to ask the guy where the flanges are.”
“Yes, exactly,” I say. “I was just using a normal word rather than the technical ‘flenge.’”
“Flange,” Jeanette said. “F-L-A-N-G-E.” I think we had this same discussion about the upstairs shower a year ago.”
“Flange, yep, that’s what I said.” Of course I was lying. I’d said “flenge.”
What hurts most is when I utter a Dad Fact and nobody bothers to correct me.
“Hey Clara, how’s Alice, that giant roommate you had last year, the one from Fargo, North Dakota?”
“Great, Dad. She’s spending the summer on a ranch.”
Jeanette pipes up to ask Clara, “Are Kylie’s parents still living in Fargo?”
“Wait,” I say. “This is amazing! Clara, two of your college friends — Alice and Kylie — both come from tiny Fargo, North Dakota? What are the chances of that?!”
“Oh, sorry, Dad,” Clara said. “Kylie is her name, not Alice. Same person. I have only one college friend from Fargo.”
“Why didn’t you guys tell me I had the wrong name?”
“We knew who you meant, honey,” said Jeanette.
Dad Facts