Free Tales from the Dad Side by Steve Doocy Page A

opening.
    â€œIt’s too high.” She had a point—it was. In fact, at that moment it was by far the most dangerous thing on our property.
    I’d spent almost five hundred dollars on our backyard tower of terror, and after my wife’s pronouncement of danger, our children were programmed to think that if they fell out, at the very least they’d spend the rest of their lives in an iron lung parked in the living room. On the plus side, we were the only ones on the block with a tree house that required an oxygen mask.
    My son, for whom I built the high-altitude apartment, spent over the years a sum total of six minutes in the tree house, which averages out to about eighty-three dollars per minute of use. If I had it to do over again, I’d just give him a hundred-dollar bill and have him stand on my shoulders until the blood drained from my head and I wised up.
    Tree houses, rafts, and fishing are charming things our parents did once upon a time but should now be verboten. I think it’s time to cut the cord on obsolete outdoor activities. If it doesn’t have an Underwriters Laboratories tag on it, don’t use it. We simply aren’t the same people we were two generations ago. Just ask a seventh-grade boy his impressions of Huckleberry Finn.
    â€œHuckle berry …that’s a new Tazo at Starbucks, right?”
    This past weekend my wife, Kathy, and I were walking in our backyard and came to a stop under our long-abandoned tree house. “One of these days I should probably take that down.” Initially dangerous, it was presently full of dangling tree branches, making it even morehazardous. It was sun baked and faded; the only piece still in good shape was the still bright yellow steering wheel on the side of the tree house.
    â€œMaybe you could drive it into somebody else’s tree,” my wife said, smiling.
    â€œAt least it didn’t sink,” I said, flashing back to the Great Cow Pasture Disaster of 1967, another inglorious moment in our family history better left alone. We adjourned to the house, where my wife prepared a splendid meal of fried catfish that I had personally caught earlier that day at Safeway.

6
Jobs
    I Was a Teenage Bread Pirate
    L exus makes mustard?” I marveled at the high-end selection of foods as I put the jar in my cart next to the Rolex tomato paste. This was the fantastic gourmet grocery store where I’d gotten my high school freshman son, Peter, a part-time job. It was a monument to food, with live lobsters over by the Kobe beef, down the aisle from the high-end imported meats and cheeses, and with every variety of fresh vegetable and fruit, and desserts fit for a state dinner. My boy was hired as a stock boy, but at this swanky place, we dubbed him a “stock analyst.”
    After his first eight-hour shift Peter reported that a high school chum saw him at work. “He said something like I didn’t know your family was broke, putting the kids to work.”
    â€œWhat did you tell him?”
    â€œThat you work in cable.”
    In fact the job was Peter’s idea because he wanted to make some money, and I wanted him to learn the value of a buck, so why not work at that store that sold monster shrimp for thirty-nine dollars a pound? Indeed, Peter learned the value of a dollar—that one buck could buy one-thirty-ninth of a pound of shrimp.
    Two years later I persuaded my daughter Mary to apply for a job as a checkout girl at the same Gucci of groceries. On her first day, her first customer welcomed her to the world of work. “You are the dumbest person I have ever seen!” the shopper wailed at my honors-student daughter when she was unable to scan, bag, and provide change as fast as a Ginsu knife salesman hopped up on Red Bull and absinthe.
    Later an infamous titan of industry yelped, “Don’t you dare, missy,” as Mary started to swipe his groceries through the checkout scanner. “The