My father was completely lost in the kitchen and never ate unless someone prepared a meal for him. When Mother was ill, however, he volunteered to go to the supermarket for her. She sent him off with a carefully numbered list of seven items.

Dad returned shortly, very proud of himself, and proceeded to unpack the grocery bags. He had one bag of sugar, two dozen eggs, three hams, four boxes of detergent, five boxes of crackers, six eggplants, and seven green peppers.

On the day I received my learner’s permit, my father agreed to take me out for a driving lesson. With a big grin, he hopped in behind the driver’s seat. “Why aren’t you sitting up front on the passenger’s side?” I asked.

“Kirsten, I’ve been waiting for this ever since you were a little girl,” Dad replied. “Now it’s my turn to sit back here and kick the seat.”

Father’s Day was near when I brought my three-year-old son, Tyler, to the card store. Inside, I showed him the cards for dads and told him to pick one.

When I looked back, Tyler was picking up one card after another, opening them up and quickly shoving them back into slots, every which way. “Tyler, what are you doing?” I asked.

“Haven’t you found a nice card for Daddy yet?”

“No,” he replied. “I’m looking for one with money in it.”

I decided to make myself useful and do a load of the family laundry. When I took the clothes out of the machine, I discovered — to my dismay — that I had also washed the watch my wife had given me while we were dating. “Don’t expect me to replace it,” she said later with an obvious lack of sympathy. By the time Father’s Day rolled around, however, she had relented and gave me a beautiful new watch. Attached was a note with this stipulation: “DRY-CLEAN ONLY!”

A neighbor finds a young boy sitting on the stairs crying. “What’s the matter, honey?” she asks him.

“It’s my father,” the boy says, sobbing. “He hit his finger with a hammer.”

“Then why are you crying?” she says.

“Because first I laughed!” he answers.

Our priest asked how things were going with my father. "Well, he has issues," I replied, then shared a few details.

After listening, he said, "Issues? Sounds like he’s got a year’s subscription."

“Why doesn’t your mother like me?” a woman asks her boyfriend.

“Don’t take it personally,” he assures her. “She’s never liked anyone I’ve dated. I once dated someone exactly like her, and that didn’t work out at all.”

“What happened?”

“My father couldn’t stand her.”

The family was viewing old slides and one flashed on the screen that caught everyone’s attention. My father, wearing his favorite golf shirt, was holding me at the tender age of three weeks.

The look on his face told all. “There’s my prize possession,” my father said.

Touched, I smiled at him as he continued, “I wonder whatever happened to that golf shirt?”

It began as an innocent game with my toddler son, Robert. I’d get in the fighter’s stance and start shadowboxing. Jabbing with both fists, I’d say, "One-two, one-two," and he would imitate me over and over.

I never thought about the consequences of this little exercise until my wife took our son to a birthday party. When the boy’s mother was handing out noisemakers she leaned over to Robert and asked, "Would you like one too?"

It took my wife a while to explain her way out of what happened next.

“29th March 2019 is going to be amazing! I’m going to wake up in my Union Jack jim-jams to the sound of a squadron of Spitfires racing overhead and leaving a trail of hot buttered crumpets behind them

I’ll run to the corner shop past all the British children who are laughing and squealing with excitement as they make a beautiful statue of the queen out of happy wriggling bulldog puppies – with two corgis for her eyebrows!

Bunting flutters everywhere and the man from the betting shop steps into the street – “Guess what! England just won the World Cup and The Ashes and The Grand National and here’s the best bit – Boris put a bet on it for everyone! you’re all MILLIONAIRES!!!”

The red arrows fly overhead dropping fish and chips as I walk into the corner shop, get my morning paper and go to the counter. “How much please?” I say to the Asian lad there. “1 pence, everything in the whole shop now costs just 1p!” he laughs, “leave it on the counter, I’m off back to Pakistan – we all are!”

And he’s right! Outside in the streets jolly old Nigel Farage is leading a huge crowd of happy foreigners – Turks, Poles, Romanians, Syrians – there’s even a few English people with heavy suntans mixed up in there! Nigel’s playing Rule Britannia on a long pipe, rather like the pipe that takes the gas into your oven, and they’re all following and smiling and talking foreign, bless them!

Just then Boris flies overhead in a Concorde made of Bank of England gold – “Don’t worry!” he laughs “I’ve cut out all the bits the French made!” and with that he crashes into the ground at 1200 miles an hour, along with the economy, the country and all the dozy nostalgic foreigner-fearing xxxxwits who fell for his bullxxxx."

^ I enjoyed that :)

On vacation my nine-year-old son, Ryan, and I were at the pool, where two attractive young women wearing thong bikinis were sunning themselves. I noticed that Ryan kept staring at them, but he would occasionally glance back at me.

When they got up to leave, Ryan watched them particularly closely. I was bracing myself for questions he might have when he turned to me and whispered, "Dad, can I take that candy bar those girls left behind?"

A friend of mine has an adopted son who, at six-foot-one, loves to play football. The boy was applying to a clubs academy, and a section of the application called for him to write a brief essay about himself. My friend got a lump in his throat as he read his son’s words: "Most of all I am thankful that I am adopted…"

Then my friend got a cold dose of reality as he continued: "because my dad is so short."

IN VINO VERITAS INDEED
 

A blonde woman and her daughter were having lunch and talking back and forth. The daughter braced herself and told her mom that her boyfriend had gotten her pregnant.


The mom thought things over before telling her daughter, to cheer her up. " Look on the bright side, maybe the baby isn't yours. "