{"id":254519,"date":"2017-06-16T06:00:15","date_gmt":"2017-06-15T20:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=254519"},"modified":"2017-06-16T06:00:15","modified_gmt":"2017-06-15T20:00:15","slug":"fathers-good-dad-ugly-knot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/fathers-good-dad-ugly-knot\/","title":{"rendered":"Fathers: The good, the dad, and the ugly knot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Fathers: The Good (Strong Wood)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>we pulled sleds behind Daddy who had the wooden *toboggan<br \/>\nthree miles up and down a snow drift road closed to traffic<br \/>\nheaded downhill past the reservoir to a small grocery store<br \/>\npulling the loaded sleds back uphill was quite a chore<br \/>\nsnow plows couldn\u2019t get through fourteen foot high drifts<br \/>\nit would be more than a week before they got through<br \/>\nwe had a wooden toboggan and Daddy knew what to do<br \/>\nhe danced the tarantella in the kitchen with his coworkers<br \/>\nbaked French bread like his Quebecois mother taught him<br \/>\nsaid no cookies \u2018if I had money we would have bought em\u2019<br \/>\nswore like the sailor as he was pick and shovel digging a<br \/>\nfrozen ditch, said Joey, this winter has been a real SOB<br \/>\nnow get in the kitchen help your mother and be good<br \/>\nwe knew that toboggan was made of strong hard wood<\/p>\n<p>* a toboggan is a long flat bottomed light sled made of thin boards curved up at one end with low handrails at the sides<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\n<strong>Fathers: The Dad<\/strong><br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\nin bars sometimes they watched boxing matches on TV<br \/>\nCeltics, Orioles, BoSox, Mets, and Yankees fans<br \/>\nwhen friends got them a couple of tickets for free<br \/>\nthen Bills, Pirates, Patriots, Saints in the stands<br \/>\nsome were teetotalers, others drowned in the bottle<br \/>\nsome good at fishing, barbecue. opening their beers<br \/>\noff to the store for milk and bread foot on the throttle<br \/>\nif they brought home ice cream us kids gave cheers<br \/>\nleft home working from early morning till after dark<br \/>\nsometimes overtime hours, sometimes on the weekends<br \/>\nwhen home they might take us to an amusement park<br \/>\nor to the movies with popcorn for us and our friends<br \/>\nFathers &#8211; mercurial men with burdens on their shoulders<br \/>\nlove for country and family, marines, sailors and soldiers<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\n<strong>Fathers: The Knot So Ugly Ties<\/strong><br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\nwas it that pencil thin moustache, perfect bow tie, or ugly cravat<br \/>\nties of all sorts were part of many a father\u2019s dress up given<br \/>\nI wore grandpa\u2019s gravy stained ties the bottoms wide and fat<br \/>\nMother said Daddy looked like the movie star David Niven<br \/>\nthen there were Dad\u2019s hats, straw in summer winter felt fedoras<br \/>\nhats were tipped to ladies, taken off when they went in church<br \/>\nin homemade knit wool caps they looked like Arctic explorers<br \/>\nflat brimmed button down caps for which they had to search<br \/>\nshoes were polished perfectly and they showed us boys how<br \/>\neven popping the rags to bring out a cordovan shiny shine<br \/>\nold rubber galoshes covered those shoes from slush and snow<br \/>\nwhen parents went out for a rare evening they both looked fine<br \/>\nfive-o\u2019clock shadows brought faces of a wanted man with a ransom<br \/>\nwe had to remember mother still thought they were quite handsome<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\n<strong>Joseph Connolly (Special to the Saipan Tribune)<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Joseph \u201cPepe Batbon\u201d Connolly is a retired CNMI PSS teacher who taught English on Tinian and Saipan from 1984 to 2014. He currently enjoys studying cosmology, Asian poetry, and life on Tinian.<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fathers: The Good (Strong Wood) we pulled sleds behind Daddy who had the wooden *toboggan&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[17240,163,17241,406],"class_list":["post-254519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-david-niven","tag-kids","tag-sob","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}