Prophet of Doom

Growing up with my dad, or the "prophet of doom", as we affectionately call him, no activity was ever considered safe.

Horseback riding. Before the words even finished my mouth, he would produce a newspaper article about some Olympic caliber rider who had been sitting on a horse since before she was born and then, one day...Bam! Her horse threw her, stepped on her head and dragged her for sixteen miles back to the barn over cactus strewn terrain.

Bike riding. Did I hear about the kid who was hit from behind by a semi and it took twenty surgeons forty-eight hours to separate him and his bike from the front grill of the truck?

Swimming. Hadn't I seen Jaws ? They didn't just pull that idea from thin air. You know, that was based on fact. Why just the week before, a swimmer was eaten by a shark in New Jersey and spit back out somewhere off the coast of Maine.

Driving. The man could find stories about car accidents that would make those drivers ed scare tactic films look like cheery little feel-good Disney movies.

Nothing was off limits. No activity no matter how big or small was ever safe. The man must have had a disaster file the size of the Matterhorn tucked away somewhere that was alphabetized, cross-referenced and indexed to provide horror stories at the drop of a hat.

It was bad enough when he was an insurance adjuster, but when he became a forensic photographer, things really went from bad to worse.

Danger, death and destruction even lurked in a seemingly harmless everyday activity like mailing a letter. Did I see the story about the woman who got a paper cut on her tongue from licking a stamp and ended up dead because of the infection that set in from the glue that they used? That, of course was after she had had both legs and one arm amputated to try and save her. See? He had pictures.

Not that this stopped anyone in our family, including him. He was the one who first put us up on the the back of a horse and taught us to ride bikes. He even taught us to drive (but that's a whole other repressed memory blog). He just couldn't help himself from sharing grisly stories. It was sort of like an involuntary reaction on his part, like a doctor tapping you on the knee and having your leg kick out.

Announce you were getting out of bed in the morning and he couldn't stop himself from pointing out all the pitfalls associated with letting your feet touch the floor. He just wanted to make sure you understood the risks and possible damage involved in, oh, everything.

During the years that my mother, brother, sister and I all took up skiing, he almost lost his mind. I'm pretty sure he had to work overtime scouring the newspapers and radio and TV news shows looking for deadly ski accidents.

Thank God there was no satellite TV back then. I'm pretty sure he would have been willing to learn Korean just to apprise us of some poor schlub on the other side of the world who had been foolish enough to strap two sticks of wood to his feet and plunge down the side of a mountain taking out dozens of other skiers, shrubs and trees before stopping when he became embedded in the side of a barn.

My sister is still trying to push him over the edge with her hobbies of motorcycle riding and collecting tattoos. He can wax poetic for a good hour or more on either subject without breaking a sweat. The History Channel could come to him if they ever decide to produce a show on the greatest motorcycle crashes ever. He has so many examples, he scoffs at the idea of using Evil Knievel as taking the easy way out.

As for the tattoos...we're waiting for her skin to shrivel up and fall off or for her brain to start seeping blue and green ink, whichever comes first.

Pat just smiles, ignores his predictions of gloom and doom, and moves on to her next hair-raising adventure.

I, on the other hand, still have nightmares of disfigured zombies lurching after me chanting, "see what happens when you wear sneakers with ties instead of velcro?" as I frantically seek the shelter of a padded room.

The only ray of sunshine here though is that I live 250 miles away, so fortunately I don't have to hear those grim tales too often. Or you would think.

Now, Tim has apparently decided to pick up the banner.

Recently, we were on a small plane with only one other passenger and, even knowing of my fear of flying (part my father, part a really, really bad flight 25 years ago, and part watching all the airplane disaster movies in the 70's), Tim turned into my father.

As we prepared to take off from a small airport in Colorado, Tim and the other gentleman proceeded to discuss, in detail, how, just a few months earlier, at that same airport, on that same runway, in a plane that same size, three pelicans had, er, merged with the plane on take-off and taken out one engine, half the cockpit and one third of the cabin.

Unable to revert to my usual method of dealing with this kind of unwanted information (clapping my hands over my ears, shutting my eyes and babbling, "I can't hear you.Lalalalalala.") in polite company, I simply glared at Tim and asked if maybe the two of them would like to go swimming after the plane landed and maybe discuss the recent spate of shark attacks along the coast.

Some things you can't escape no matter how hard you try.