The Prevaricator...Phyllis

You can call my dad a prevaricator. He would start a story and it would go here, then go off track, weaving and winding around, making things up as he went along and never got to the point. We were sitting at the dinner table once in September. I know it was September because I had just brought home a brand new spelling book from school. I accidentally tore the front cover and I was very worried about it. It was fresh and new and I was disappointed that I ripped it. I taped it back together and it was almost like new again. I never was a very good speller. I got Cs in spelling and an occasional D. Even now, when I hit spell check, it sounds like a chainsaw tearing through my work. He would go on and on and the rest of us would look at each other and my mom would smoke a whole pack of cigarettes while he went round and round like a merry-go-round.

You know, the merry-go-rounds at school were big, heavy metal contraptions. Not like the playground equipment now that’s made of colorful nerf. And they were surrounded with asphalt. If you got forty kids on it and got it spinning, the centrifugal force would throw about seven of them off and we wouldn’t see them again for weeks. The teeter totter was fun, too. They were also made of metal and on a hot day, they would burn the skin right off your legs. It was great fun to jump off when your friend was up and you were down, sending her crashing full force to the ground and biting through her tongue. Well, fun for me, anyway. That’s probably why, to this day, I size people up when I first meet them. If they appear to weigh less than me, then yeah, I’ll teeter totter with them.

And so he would go on and on. We would look at our watches, and we weren’t wearing watches. I’ve never owned a nice watch. I’ve gotten Timex watches for gifts and I was very happy with them. I don’t wear a watch nowadays, but I always seem to know about what time it is. I get to work on time. That’s about the only time I really have to be concerned about it. According to Einstein, time is relative. Try using that excuse when you’re late for work. They don’t buy that theory there. They also don’t respond well to the ‘does-anyone-really-know-what-time-it-is’ excuse. “You’re lucky I came in at all” doesn’t go over very well, either.

But if my dad were alive today and if he were telling a story, I would pretend to look at my watch. And I would think, “This is a trait I’m glad I didn’t inherit.”