As the good Dr. Hunter S. Thompson might describe him, my dad was one of god’s experimental prototypes that were never considered for mass production. If you knew him, you’d know that he was hardly the definition of a social butterfly; many might even say he was quiet. Those who travelled with him knew that we was prone to gleek on you without warning with a mischievous glint in his eye. Those who angered him knew how very loud he could get. I, too, have the same volume available to me when I need it. My dad was a quiet weirdo who once got a perm for some reason and always loved camels.
Look at them – two peas in a pod.
Though, For a humble Iowa farmer boy he sure did know a whole lot of people, and he didn’t just know them, he reached out to them. He taught them. He encouraged them. He supported them. He connected them. If he was operating a motor vehicle, he terrified them. The two words that would best describe my dad: LET’S GO!
That was his mantra.
He was always going somewhere and most of the time bringing someone else along for the ride. He was a true traveler, and could never stay in one place for too long. If you read his elementary school report cards, you’d see his teachers said the same thing. He had ants in his pants. Since my dad finally and mercifully passed last week and I knew I would be eulogizing him, I have been trying to find an appropriate metaphor to use as a reference point for my thoughts about him. Several clichés came to mind such as “still water runs deep” or “90% of icebergs are below the surface,” but thankfully my dad was just a little bit too weird for such fugazi hallmark sentiments.
Even though the last of it’s kind is likely rusting away in some midwestern junkyard, my thoughts kept coming back to the PUPPET VAN…
There were several different incarnations of the puppet van, but both of them were mid-to-late 70s Ford Econoline conversion vans that had been fitted, customized and renovated with a custom airbrushed exterior, shag carpet, velvet curtains and 4 blue velour Captain’s chairs. It’s the Elkhart Indiana version of Pimp My Ride for evangelical traveling puppeteers. The Puppet Van was simultaneously the cheesiest thing in existence and the epitome of hipster cool. Think Chucky Cheese sings Dean Martin’s greatest hits.
My dad would drop me off at school in this van with puppets and clowns airbrushed all over it, and I would always beg him to drop me off several blocks down the street so that the kids would stop making fun of me. My dad had none of it: “Don’t be ashamed of where you come from, son. They’re not your friends if they’re making fun of you.”
No shit, dad.
In retrospect, it WAS kind of cool in a the very weirdest way. At the very least I know those mean junior high kids probably still remember me. I didn’t have Summers like the normal secular kids did. Most summers, a few weeks after school was out, my dad and I would hop in the van and hit the road with a cooler between the captains chairs along with several bags of chips, beef jerky, pork rinds, RC Cola, Mountain Dew, green grapes and chocolate donuts. Now, these were not purely pleasure cruises. No way. We were road warriors for Christ, travelling the highways and byways to teach workshops and sell puppets to religious children’s workers across the bible belt, people that were “saving children’s souls for Jesus,” but that’s a whole ‘nother story. Might even be an entire book. We’ll see – my wife is always telling me I need to write about it.
In any case, driving across the country in the puppet van with my dad sure beat the heck out of the $1 an hour he paid me to collate his puppet newsletter in the basement. Like most fathers of his generation is he had absolutely no regard for child labor laws, but who was I going to complain to? Jesus?
Over the years I spent so much time in the back of that puppet van barreling down American highways that images and memories all tend to blend together into one giant mental mural of the summers I spent traveling in the puppet van with my dad. My sister and I were never allowed to go to the theater to see movies, so much of those trips I spent hunkered down on the shag carpet in the back of that van, feeling the heat of the road plying beneath us and reading some book that was an adaptation of a film that had just come out that I was not allowed to see. I had to know what happened in the movies even if I was not allowed to see them so that my status as a human being at school was not called into question.
My dad never wanted to let you stop and go to the bathroom even when you had two and you were grinding your knees together to try not to pee your pants. His go-to insult to his road passengers was “Tiny tank”. My dad really was a camel in human clothing. My dad’s dad was a pig farmer in a tiny Iowa town called Farmington. Every time we went through that area of the country we would stop at the pig farm and I love seeing the pigs. We would go canoeing down the rivers around there and it seems like we were always in Iowa for the 4th of July so that we could blow things up and shoot cans in the back yard with grandpa’s .22 Marlin rifle.
We would always stop at the strange roadside attractions if only for a few minutes to see the world’s largest ball of twine or a giant cement dinosaur or prairie dog or America’s largest or bestest or silliest whatever. We would stop briefly and drive often. Driving that van was my dad’s meditation. I can only imagine as he’s sitting there careening down the highway at 90 miles an hour reading the USA today and listening to oldies on the radio that the sky and the road would blend together and become one, and my dad would have his customary out of body experience that always kept him coming back to the never ending expanse of American road.
Over time my dad took me through all 50 states and various international jaunts to Barbados, the Bahamas, Canada, Mexico, England, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Andorra, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Russia and Belarus. He didn’t stop there he did the same thing with the 50 states for my son and my nephew. He also took my son to the Far East which I never got a chance to visit.
Countless times over many years I was lucky enough to be able to share in my dad’s travels. Many times I have said goodbye to him when he went off on one of his own. And now his friends and family all must say goodbye together, but make no mistake: the restless spirit of Saint LaVerne is out there on the road, still speeding along the highways and byways, stopping only long enough to fill up both tanks in his pimped out puppet van, and refuel his corporeal form with black coffee and hostess mini-donut vitamins. Gleek on Captain Von, gleek on.