“There are two ways to go about things,” he said. I saw on his face this was the serious talk, not the one where he converses, the one in which he teaches. Usually the intricacies of life, the seriousness of living, that sort of thing. “You either do them right or do them wrong. Period. Those people that think they can do things half-assed are generally that…half-assed.”

I knew he was going to say that or something like that. I knew it and I hated it. I hated those lectures in the car, the lectures he’d spew at me whenever we were alone. Like the mountain about to give way, I could see the lecture coming, almost feel it. Still, I listened. I always listened. I had no choice. It was either that or open the door and fling myself out of the car going god-knows what speed. No, I listened, pushing myself against the car door like a cat hiding in the corner.

“I know, Dad. You tell me that all the time.” I said those words like every kid does that’s heard the same lecture from his father, a little sigh tinged with just a touch of I’ve heard that 1000 times already. He knew it too, but it didn’t matter, he was going to repeat it over and over until it stuck.

“Yeah, I know. You’re tired of me saying the same thing over and over but it’s the only way I know to get you to listen.”

Get me to listen. As though he had to get me to listen. I had no choice, it was just me and him in the car and as I said, there was no place for me to go unless I wanted to be a stunt man, and that wasn’t going to happen.

“Someday,” he said…

I know what’s next. I always knew what was next.

“Someday, you’ll grow up and all of this will make sense. Right now, it doesn’t but it will, you watch.”

You watch. The punctuation at the end of the statement. The coup de grâce. The final notification that I was going to recall this car ride sometime in the distant future and remember this conversation and when I do, I’ll say out loud, “I watched, damnit, and he was right.”

It wasn’t the advice that was bothersome to me with those car rides, just that I was subjected to them when I did take a ride. That was Dad’s thing with me. Take a ride.

“Hey, wanna take a ride?”

“Where we going?” I’d ask.

Sometimes the places were innocuous like the store. Any store. A store to pick something up. Pick anything up. At others, it was, “I’m heading to the track. Wanna go?”

The track meant the horse races, usually Hawthorne or Sportsman’s Park or even Maywood Park which was right down the street. I didn’t like going to the track as it meant for me a lot of sitting around while Dad went through the form, studied the races and placed his bets. He was good at it, and for him, a way to relax and get away from the world of work, a world he’d inhabited almost non-stop from the earliest years.

He’d ask me to pick a horse too, but I almost never won. It was like throwing coins in a fountain and wishing for good luck. Most of the time the wishes were forgotten anyway so if they did come true, I had no idea. At the track the wish almost never came true.

The ride always turned into the lecture. Always.

Over time, and as I got older, I didn’t tag along on the rides much. I was either busy with my own thing, whatever that was, or I simply decided I’d had enough of the coming lectures and avoided going, preferring my room, reading a book, or something like that. On occasion I pictured Dad at the track, sitting in the grandstand or near the winner’s circle watching those magnificent animals parade themselves in front of the crowd, collecting their flowers and taking pictures with their owners after the big race.

Sometimes, I pictured him driving alone to wherever he was going with just the radio on. I wondered if he wished I was there, and sometimes right after he left, I second guessed myself, wishing I’d gone along.

There’s always next time, I’d tell myself. Funny, we tell ourselves about that always coming next time never really knowing for sure if its going to come, just like we told our buddies after the pickup game we’d see them next week but one day, that next week never came as life got in the way. We didn’t know that pick up game was the last one, we just assumed they’d always be there. Then, one day, they weren’t. They were just gone.

Eventually, there came a time when Dad didn’t ask me to go for a ride anymore. It wasn’t out of malice or fedupness…it was about life. It was about me growing up, getting involved in my own existence and either not having the time or not being around enough to do it. There were the occasional rides together, rides where we spoke about my family, my life, and how things were going, but not like the ones we had when I was a kid, where he’d drop all this knowledge about life on me, and me, pushing against the car door, absorbing his wisdom through osmosis if nothing else.

We had a few more conversations in the car on the way to his chemo treatments, but those were little more than surface conversations; in substance, no depth, just talk. Talk to keep our minds off of what we both knew and wanted to avoid. Eventually, our conversations stopped…forever…and I found myself thinking back to the ones we had in the car. I kept coming back to what we spoke about, the lessons learned. Sometimes, I found when raising my own children I spoke in his words, teaching my kids the same lessons he taught me in almost the exact same fashion…in the car…while we were going for a ride someplace. Sometimes I even heard his voice coming from my mouth.

You watch…