Seventy-Seven

Today my dad turns 77 years old. This past Monday he had a total hip replacement on his right hip, so he’s celebrating being on this earth 77 years by becoming part man/part machine.

For the last couple of years my dad has been dealing with what he thought was back pain, but it turned out that his body creates too much calcium which becomes calcium deposits. These deposits ended up in his right hip socket and became extremely painful bone spurs. His hip was so bad that when the doc got in there he discovered that my dad’s hip ball joint had gone clear up into his pelvis, due to the bone eroding.

Yeah, ouch.

I can’t blame him for thinking it was his back. Back in the spring of 2019 he rolled off my parents roof and landed in a bush, then rolled off to the ground. He tried pretending it didn’t happen because he knew my mom would have been pissed at him for going up on the roof by himself(falling off the roof is a Hubner curse, as my dad’s dad did the same thing when he was 76.) But after a couple hours of sitting silently in pain he admitted to my mom what happened and she took him to the E.R.

Besides joint issues, my dad is in pretty good shape. No cardiovascular issues, just torn ligaments thanks to years of senseless jogging in shoes that had little to no support. I can remember being a little kid and my dad getting home from work, changing into the 80s jogging gear, and disappearing for an hour or so. I never understood his need to run, as in my mind jogging was(and still is) torture. But he did it. We even had a free weight set, a punching bag, and a stair stepper. The stair stepper was of the primitive variety, as it was manual with the exception of the digital readout which ran on a 9 volt battery and basically just told you when your heart was going to explode.

Where my dad was very active, I was not. I think at one point he was worried I was heading down the path of a giant, overweight shut-in at 10-years old. So much so he tried bribing me into health and fitness by offering me $5 for every pull up I could do out in the garage. The pull up bar was a metal bar dad hung in the garage where no one ever did pull ups. Instead he hung the wet car towels on it after he washed/waxed the family sedan.

Anyways, the bribe didn’t work. I think I tried doing a pull up once, but it was so unsuccessful that I scrubbed the memory out of my brain with a Totino’s frozen pizza and a Mountain Dew.

My sense of humor comes from my dad. It’s subtle, but precise. Very Midwestern. My dad could always think of the perfect thing to say that was both absolutely hysterical, but also a slight jab. It hurt, but you had to laugh(still does, too.) I once came home from elementary school after “weigh in” day, where the nurse came into class with one of those old school scales on wheels. You stood on it and she could get your weight and measure your height with a metal bar that swung out, which she laid on your head. Anyways, I went home that day and told my parents I’d lost a quarter pound. After eating my quarter pounder meal for supper dad informed me I just gained the quarter pound back that I lost.

Dad humor? I don’t know.

He’d also write captions on the back of our family photos. Not just “Family Vacation, Minnesota 1977”. It’d be things like “John and Josh play German Guard/Jewish Prisoner’. It’d be a picture of my cousin Josh and I in my grandma’s kitchen at Thanksgiving. I was a hulking lad in Husky jeans, while my cousin was 100 lbs soaking wet.

He could take it as good as he gave it, too. One year my wife got my dad a subscription to Consumer Reports. Instead of using his actual name, she had them come to my parents house addressed to “Big Willy Hubner”. It came to their house like that for years. We still laugh at that one. At least I do.

Mostly though, you wanted to make my dad laugh. When you made “Big Willy Hubner” laugh you felt like you’d accomplished something. When you made the funniest person in the room laugh you felt you’d leveled up, and my dad was always the funniest person in the room. Still is, actually.

I’d always loved my dad and appreciated everything he’d done for me over the years; whether helping me build soundproof booths for my studio, or helping me enclose a practice space in the basement before our first child was born. The times he’d take my mower over to his place and do yearly maintenance on it, or giving advice when something broke down I didn’t know how to fix. Or even the emails he’d send me from work “so he wouldn’t lose his email account” and ask how the day was or what project we needed to start working on next.

His influence, whether he realized it or not, on me in regards to music is also an important factor in my life. I grew up in a house with albums and a nice Pioneer hi fi stereo to listen to them on. I remember going to Butterfly Records with him when he’d buy records. Alice Cooper, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and the Beatles were just a few he’d buy for the record collection. I was home sick once and asked him if he’d buy me the Return of the Jedi Tatooine Skiff vehicle toy from 3D before he came home from work. Instead he brought me a cassette of Sammy Hagar’s Cruisin n Boozin. At the time I was a little disappointed. Well, I guess I still am because that toy would be worth mad money right now.

Anyways, I can appreciate him wanting to get me into music. It did work, as within a couple years I was starting to collect cassette tapes of my own. I think he just wanted me to find something to be passionate about. For him it was cars and art as he was a really great artist. He knew I wasn’t ever going to be a gear head, or some great athlete(or any kind of athlete.) When I showed interest in learning guitar he supported me 100%, buying me my first acoustic and paying for weekly guitar lessons for me from the time I was 12 to 17-years old.

But the last 8 years or so I’ve gotten a lot closer to my dad. When he retired from his job after 50 years at the beginning of 2014 dad started coming over every Saturday morning for coffee. It’s been a regular thing ever since. I feel like with him coming over almost every Saturday I’ve gotten to know my dad a lot more. And over these past few years it feels more like we’re equals, where as before I always still looked up to my dad like he was Buddha or something. A tall Buddha. Like I didn’t have anything to offer him in the ways of life or knowledge. But I don’t feel that way now. I still look up to my dad, but now I feel like maybe I offer a point of view that dad can appreciate and maybe even take something away from.

I hope when and if I get to 77 years on this rock my kids feel an inkling of what I feel for my dad. Just a smidge of that appreciation and love that I’ve come to feel for the guy I’m proud to call dad. The funny, towering man that showed me how to be a provider and put your family above your own wants and needs, while still showing me the importance of being passionate about something outside of myself.

Happy Birthday, Big Willy Hubner.