For Father's Day: Last blast from the past

After a year, time for review

To: Stephen Christopher

From: Mom and Dad

Re: Performance to date

We’ve decided to sit down with you now, a little earlier than normal, and review your performance.

We know your official anniversary date isn’t until tomorrow, but your mother and I aren’t sticklers for full formality.

We’ve been for the most part pleased with your performance, so you’ll be happy

to know we’ve decided to keep you on with the organization.

And we believe the positives outweigh the negatives, so we believe there is room for advancement in the organization.

But we also believe in setting goals. We’ve allowed you in this first year to kind find your way with the organization.

We were really pleased you were able to join us a year ago. It was an intense,

nine-month negotiation before the deal was clinched, and that last session —

what a whopper.

Started at 10:45 p.m. on a Thursday night and didn’t finish until 6:32 p.m. the next day.

As noted, we’ve been extremely pleased since.

You’ve shown a real flair for making people smile, particularly your grandmothers.

But I think you made your Grandpa Guilfoyle almost cry a couple of times as well — one of those “happy cry” type things — but you need to watch that in the future.

Your strengths? For one, you are doing very well at keeping a schedule. Like your father, you have a real talent for sleeping. Also like your father, you can almost walk a straight line. You like to prop yourself up on the biplane your Grandma and Grandpa Larson bought you, but you are beginning to move away from needing that.

You have shown a talent for sucking up in specific ways to your Daddy.

You kissed him three times on Father’s Day, but really haven’t that much since. You also said “Dada” first, and meant it. but you gave it up after a couple of days.

You perk up with a smile whenever you are around your mother, and she can make you laugh like no one else can.

That’s a more generic way of sucking up. Both your mother and I don’t mind the sucking up.

We aren’t criticizing. We just want to make a note of it now, so you’ll know, later on, that we were on to you from the get-go.

Yes, this memo is going in your permanent file with the organization.

You already can throw very good. A small ball gets tossed across the room with either arm. You roll your big ball with your mother, playing a roll-y kind of catch which she thinks is brilliant.

Your Father wants you to be a major league pitcher sohe can sponge off you in his

dotage. Unfortunately, his dotage is probably going to start next week, so you might have to grow up kind of fast.

You crawl with speed. You are active and fast.

There is some room for improvement in several key areas, however. You haven’t said “Mama” yet, and we’d really like to see some movement in that area.

You have steadfastly refused to settle on a hair color, but what little colorless hair you have is getting almost long enough to need a trip to the barber shop.

You do seem to catch a lot of colds. But when you go to the doctor’s office, you are

almost uniformly a good boy.

You do seem to fuss a lot when you have a cold and your mother and I have to

suction your nose.

Let’s set a timetable for you to learn how to blow your own nose, and thus we won’t have to keep doing this unpleasant task. We won’t feel guilty making you cry, and you will get your nose cleared out that much sooner.

It will be a win-win for all involved.

We’d like to see some more movement in the teeth area as well. A little girl born just one week before you has more than twice as many teeth as you.

Your mother believes in this area that whatever pace you are on is fine.

Your father is too competitive for his own good. You not only need to catch up, you need to get ahead and stay ahead.

We’re not just talking incisors. We’d like to see some cuspids and molars within the next year.

You haven’t noticed, but we have —you have actually stood on your own a couple of times without holding on. but you snake your arm back to daddy’s leg or the ottoman or the couch or whatever you are leaning on.

When you don’t think about it, you can stand.

When you think about what you are doing, you fall on your butt. Boom.

We don’t want you to not think, but you need to not think about this area a lot

more.

I’ve started working with you on standing a little bit.

But this is another thing where you are going to have to do most of the work.

Once you stand on your own, you’ll quickly be walking on your own.

Your mother wants to see this as much as possible.

Your father is afraid he definitely won’t be able to keep up once you’re really moving along.

This review, of course, comes after the positive reviews you got at your three-month and six-month probationary periods.

As per organization policy, at this stage, with the good reviews, we have indeed decided to make you a permanent part of the organization.

From now on out, there will just be annual reviews.

In other words, we guess we’re going to keep you.

For Father's Day: Another blast from the past

I wrote this for my dad's birthday in 2000.

Dad taught me to be who I am

News Editor

Stephen Guilfoyle

When he was born –

• a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not yet president.

• the greatest epoch of the 20^th Century, World War II, was nine years in the future;

• a small man full of hatred was legally forbidden to speak in Germany, but Adolf Hitler, not yet elected to anything, was gaining influence and backing from powerful industrialists of that country;

• there was a 40-foot deep pit on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 32nd Street, where, 18 months later, would rise the grandest building ever built, the Empire State Building; and

• the New York Yankees were the greatest baseball team ever, with a lineup that included Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

I’m a mean kid at times and sometimes I make fun of my dad for being old.

But I look back on the world into which he was born and I realize that he has indeed somehow, behind my back, really gotten old.

I’ve never much written about my dad because it’s more fun to make fun of Mom, because her sense of humor is always taxed.

I often wonder why someone like Dad, who always jokes, ended up with Mom, who almost never does.

Dad and I go to movies. That’s what we do. We talk football now.

I am whatever kind of man one might think I am because of what I learn from him.

But I learn not from him telling me what he wants to teach, but from my watching what he

does.

I picked the historical markers, because they all have some significance to either his life or my

view of it.

Roosevelt, well, that’s my joke. “Geez, Dad, you were born before Roosevelt was President.”

And Roosevelt was president for a long time.

The Empire State Building, well, I connect that with Dad because he’s always seemed to

me a New Yorker. He’s settled down fine in South Carolina these past 20 years, but it’s just not his natural place.

If someone were to put him in an alien zoo and were to create his natural habitat, there would have to be canyons made of concrete and glass and subways.

Hitler is not included because Dad was a tyrant. Dad is a gentle man. But Dad took a little trip to Ireland when he was a youth and got stuck there for years because of World War II.

He was raised over there by his aunt.

It shaped him to be a very different sort from his brother and his sister.

I include the Yankees because, despite being born in the Bronx, the Yankees were never his team.

But it is important to note that the greatest team of all time was the Yankees of the ’30s.

When my father was born in 1930, those Yankees were a segregated team, white men only need apply.

One of the most important lessons I learned from my father, and about my father, came unspoken

but etched in deep.

My father’s favorite baseball team was dem Bums, the Brooklyn Dodgers. His favorite player

was Jackie Robinson.

My father loved Jackie Robinson’s ability to make a play out of nothing, score a run after getting

walked to first base.

It taught me all I ever needed to know about race relations and how to judge people. You judge a man by his ability, not by the color of his skin.

What a fabulous teacher he was. I gained a core belief in justice and fair play and fundamental human equality, just because Dad said, “Jackie Robinson was my favorite baseball player.”

So my Dad turned 70 Tuesday.

I wish there were someway to stop it, but I can’t. Instead, I’ll remember again all that he’s taught me. .

And I’ll feel humbled, because I’m not half the man he is, but I’ll feel lucky that I know to keep trying to measure up