Father’s Day came and went, but it left me thinking—again—about my dad, who’s been dead seven years now. Not in a sentimental, “he taught me how to ride a bike” kind of way. No Hallmark fuzzies here. What I remember best about my father is the hush-hush pact we seemed to enter when I was very young: He would show me how the world really worked—messy, absurd, flammable at times—and in return, I wouldn’t tell Mom.
1.
The first dead body I ever saw belonged to Duchess, our border collie who was the spitting image of Lassie. I must have been four or five years old when I found her in the kitchen one morning, splayed out under the table. A halo of blood framed her head like a religious icon in one of those pre-Renaissance paintings that haven’t quite figured out perspective. The color was deep crimson, almost black—something richer and stranger than any red I’d ever seen. Years later, reading The Odyssey, I came across Homer’s description of the Aegean: “the wine-dark sea.” I knew exactly what he meant.
Not knowing what else to do, I peeled an orange and turned on the TV. “The Great Space Coaster” was on. Gary Gnu was reading the gnews. When the grown-ups came downstairs, my mother and grandmother screamed and then cried. My father handled logistics. My mother wanted Duchess cremated. My father had other ideas, as it was trash day.
I watched my dad double-bag Duchess—not a small dog—and wrangle her body into the bottom of the garbage can like a mafia hitman on a tight deadline. He wheeled her out to the curb and saw me watching from the window. Then he came back inside, knelt down, and said two things:
“Duchess is in a better place now.”
“And don’t tell your mother about this.”
2.
Duchess was actually my grandmother’s dog. Grandma’s real name was Alice Junkin, but when she went to work at NBC she rechristened herself Nancy Booth Craig. Nancy was many things—concert pianist, pilot, radio and television personality, publishing executive—but when she died, she was just a waxy body in a ruched box at Hatton’s Funeral Home. And I, age nine, wanted to stick my finger in her nose.
I was knuckle-deep when a horrified family friend yanked my hand away and ratted me out to my mother. But my dear, sainted mother was too grief-stricken to do anything but weep into a balled-up tissue. I wandered off to the basement lounge, where I found a lighter and set the edge of the floral-patterned couch on fire. Grief hits humans in a startling variety of ways.
I was in a pyromaniac phase at the time. Trash cans, stacks of newspapers, unattended leaf piles—I’d been lighting little fires all around the neighborhood. A junior arsonist in training. But this one got out of hand.
A dour man from the funeral home caught me admiring my handiwork and ratted me out to my father, who dragged me back to the smoldering couch and sat me down on it.
He said two things:
“You need to stop setting things on fire, or I’m going to have to beat the living daylights out of you.”
“And don’t tell your mother about this.”
3.
The day I realized my father was mortal came not long after Duchess was left on the curb. Dad was preparing a fire in the grill to cook some steaks Mom had left out to defrost. It was a steamy August Saturday. He’d been drinking Genesee Cream Ale all afternoon, the old green cans stacking up like tiny totems on the picnic table. He’d worked at the Genesee Brewery in college and liked to regale me with stories of on-the-job drunkenness, forklift mishaps, and severed appendages. “This was all before OSHA, of course,” he’d say, as if five-year-old me was deeply concerned with federal labor standards.
Lacking lighter fluid, Dad sent me to the garage for the red jerry can of gasoline. I brought it back like a dutiful pageboy, and he doused the grill with it—sloshing some down his pant leg for good measure.
When he struck the match, the resulting fireball roared to life, lit up the siding on the house, and engulfed my father in a vertical wall of flame.
And then he ran.
This man—who had not jogged, stretched, or exercised since the Kennedy administration—sprinted across the yard like a man possessed. He flattened the hostas, hurdled the side of our above-ground pool, and vaulted into the deep end, a flaming comet shedding his gas-soaked cargo.
I stood there, frozen. Awestruck. Watching the bubbles rise.
When he surfaced, steam rolling off his clothes, he didn’t speak. He looked like a mythological creature reborn from the underworld. Then he caught my eye. He grinned the widest grin in his arsenal of grins and said:
“Go get me a beer.”
“And don’t tell your mother about this.”
It’s been years since I’ve heard my dad utter those words, but I can still hear them. They formed the unofficial motto of my childhood. Not a threat. Not exactly a confidence. Just a glimpse into the flawed, hilarious, combustible man behind the dad mask.
This article appears in July 2025.
