APRIL 25, 2023 – Rumor had it—actually a local newspaper reported it in an article about my dad and our family when at 32 he was appointed to the public servant job he’d have for the rest of his working days. “It” was my mother’s notion that parents should always use positive language when framing directives to their young kids. For example, instead of saying, “Don’t run into the street without first looking,” the parent should say, “Always look first before you run into the street.” Her philosophy was that if a parent avoided “no” and “don’t,” the kids would subliminally learn to think and talk in positive ways.
I don’t know if she had any compelling evidence for her purported theory, but I remember that she talked and walked a good game. My sisters turned out pretty well in the attitude department, so perhaps mother’s positive outlook had some traction. I, however, was a consistent exception: every Sunday morning, for instance, I groused in reaction to Mother’s throwing open my bedroom door and shouting musically, “Time to rise and shine!” Within a short half hour, I knew, I’d be collared off to church and Sunday school—before I’d have a chance to read the funnies. And then there was my actively negative response to Mother’s daily call to practice my violin.
Dad, meanwhile, never subscribed to Mother’s “think-and-act-positive-so-your-kid-will-too” philosophy. After all, his Swedish origins were farther north than Mother’s English and Scottish ancestry (with a pinch of Dutch). He was often 100% negative. For example, “If you don’t practice,” his words still echo, “you’re not going to Dairy Queen.” That was wholly negative, because there was no way I was going to practice, which meant there was no way I’d be going to Dairy Queen.
His signature moment of negativity, however, was the day my new sailboat arrived. As a young teenager I’d ordered the Sunfish-class boat from Sears Roebuck and paid for it by way of an IPO snapped up by (positive) Mother to supplement my meager savings. Under her instruction, I even fashioned a stock certificate. I didn’t know it at the time, but technically it was preferred stock, since on the face of the certificate I’d guaranteed “unlimited rides.”
Anyway, the big Sears truck dropped off the boat on the grass of our front yard late one gloriously beautiful summer day. The fiberglass hull was packaged in cardboard, with rudder/tiller and daggerboard tucked into the cockpit. The sail and rigging were wrapped up inside a separate cardboard container.
Just before suppertime, as curious neighborhood kids watched me unpack everything and spread out the sail over the grass, Dad’s Buick bounded into the driveway. He exited the car, and with his suit coat hooked on his index finger and draped over his shoulder, he stepped over for a closer look. He’d been informed about my purchase several days before, so the boat’s arrival was no surprise. When his eyes settled on the big, bold, encircled “F” at the top of the white-and-orange striped sail, however, he let out a slight chuckle, laced with sarcasm.
The first words out of his mouth: “What does the ‘F’ stand for, ‘Failure?’”
“No, it stands for ‘Fantastic,’” I said in miffed retort. I was able to forgive Dad, pretty much on the spot, because despite his negative take on a lot of things, he was consistently kind, warm-hearted, and enthusiastic about many good, interesting things, from books and geography to art and music to the woods and nature to how stuff was made and how it worked. His negativity, I later decided, was simply skepticism, the natural outgrowth of exceptionally analytical thinking. He was the way he was, just as Mother was the way she was—someone who saw not the hurdles but the possibilities in life; a lover of boats and the sea, unlike Dad, an inveterate landlubber, and ever the one to tack with my ideas.
In the end, all things worked out: deploying his engineering skills with his usual gratification, Dad improvised his old trailer to ferry the boat up to the cabin and down to the lake. And Mother enjoyed a tidy return on her preferred stock in “Fleetwind, Inc.”
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
