Thanks for the Foot Up

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Dear Dad:

I was thinking about some advice you gave me. So there are two reasons you’d better sit down: the shock of receiving a letter from your son; the revelation that he’s capable of absorbing advice. Your sage words came decades ago. I remember the day clearly. I’d stepped on a nail. Or wrecked on my bike. Or caused some blood-spewing wound to open up on my foot. Like I say, I remember like it was yesterday.

Your initial response to the situation was typical: “Welp, you’ll have that.” That’s what you always said. If someone lost a new coat, poured a gallon of milk on his sister’s head or returned from an alien abduction with blueprints for a time-travel machine, your rejoinder was always the same. These days, when your granddaughter does a Flying Walenda leap onto the coffee table, I find myself noting, “Welp, you’ll have that.” (Your daughter-in-law’s reaction to such incidents is just slightly less Zen-like.) This, however, is not my point.

A couple of months ago, you remember, I broke my fibula. The leg cast is gone. The surgery was a success, and the bone has mended. But there was a scar, and for a long time, it’s been oozing and scabby (I’ll leave out the really gross details, in case Mom reads this). I can walk now, so my dress shoes—sadly—had to be pulled back out of the closet. And the obligatory matching black socks. Sigh. But when I was 8 years old, or 10—maybe I was 21, come to think of it—you uttered the words that resonate with me to this day: “Don’t wear colored socks when you’ve got an open cut on your foot.” It’s become my mantra.

I’m not kidding.

Over the years you’ve given much weightier advice: “Don’t eat yellow snow.” “Don’t buy a used car from a guy named Louie the Fence.” “Don’t wear flip-flops to a job interview.” Unfortunately, I did, I did, and I almost did but it was cold, so I wore sneakers. For some reason, though, the colored-socks thing stuck. Now, I find myself wearing white tube socks under my black socks. On my own, I’ve discovered many things. For example, I know Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh are the same manipulative shill operating from polar ends of the political spectrum. I know people on the obituary page die in alphabetical order—unless they ever appeared in a motion picture or were involved in Watergate. I know professional athletes can make Forrest Gump look like Alex Trebek, but that every sports reporter would give his medulla oblongata for a week in the bigs. And I now know the most precious thing in life is a 3-year-old—especially one who tosses a penny in a fountain and when you ask what she wished for, she replies, “A penny.”

These are things discovered on my own. I don’t know for sure if science has perfected the dress sock that won’t bleed colored dye into an open cut. But until the scar heals, the tube socks stay. Thanks for the advice. I was listening. Happy Father’s Day.

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