phone calls with my dad now begin with: "chelsea! did you get married yet?!" "dad! no!" followed by some variation of me reminding him that he has to walk me down the aisle and also asking him for the umpteenth time if he's sure he will dance with me and him saying he will.
my favorite of his responses to that was, "oh yeah! we used to do all kinds of dancing when i was your age. fast dancing, slow dancing, pretty much any kind of dancing you can think of ..." good stuff dad, two speeds of dancing and i already have countless images of what that must have looked like flashing through my mind. laughing? who me? nooo i'm not laughing, must be phone static ...
"yeah we'd go out to bars and clubs with rock music and bands. we called it "clubbing" chelsea." no kidding dad? i haven't even heard of this phenomenon you and your buddies so cleverly referred to as "clubbing," unlike anyone else before or after you. ohhhh my dad.
if i could travel through time, i would want to hop around through my parents lives. maybe that's a boring wish considering all the options, but i would especially love to observe my parents when they were my age. would we have been friends? we are now, but i don't think we would have been when they were young.
a silly concept, but one i apparently love because i also raised the question of whether lance and i would have been friends in high school if we had known each other then. as a (formerly) very nerdy wallflower i say no, but he, the (still) popular athlete, insists we would have been friends. which i don't believe but it still makes me happy to hear so i think he's figured me out. ;-)
my dad loves lance's name. so far he doesn't remember his last name (and checks what it is every time he calls) but he always comments on what a good first name he has. this is huge progress from just calling him "that army guy" and shuddering before another, "do you know what they teach those guys in the army chelsea?" "what dad." "ohhh, drinking and smoking and playing cards and gambling and women, well ... you know what i mean." "dad you learned all of that stuff without the army." "now chelsea, i never got into gambling."
it's like who is trying to get who more riled up here, and who is more annoying? the answer to this question knows no limit because we are both pretty tricky. then he talks about how he would not have made it in the army, and asks me (again) if i knew that elvis was in the army.
because my dad loves celebrities and frankly so do i. it is what it is. soon after whitney houston died, i was standing in a checkout line with my dad and saw a magazine with her picture that reminded me to mention it. "dad did you hear about whitney houston?" "yeah, she died?" "yeah but did you hear how it happened? she overdosed on drugs and drowned in a hotel bathtub."
and this is the part that i wish i had on camera, because i can't describe the look on his face, more than you would have thought i was talking about his dearest family member as he started shaking his head and looked me in the eye and said, "oh my God." it should be noted that in earlier conversation about something he (in my opinion) should have had that kind of reaction to, he was un-phased. but the thought of whitney houston, a complete stranger, dying that way was just more than he could handle. i was crying from laughing at his dramatic reaction. which is equally weird and further proves i am his daughter - yikes.
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