Bob Dylan's Son-In-Law Increased My Appreciation For My Father

In the springtime, the call went out to all Boy Scout fathers: they were invited to Camp Wauwepex for Camp Fix-Up Day.  The fathers would help get the boy scout camp ready for summer.  They were asked to bring their tools with them.

When my brother heard this, he turned to me and said, “What tools will Dad take to Fix-Up Day?  Sharpened number two pencils?”

Around our house, we had seen our father unplug a toilet with a plumbers’ helper and shovel coal into the furnace.  But we had never seen him use tools; as far as we knew, he had never drilled a hole in something or pounded a nail with a hammer.

We often saw him with sharpened number two pencils.  Our father was an accountant, and he would bring his work home.  He would carefully sharpen his pencils and then line them up on the kitchen table.  Out would come a large 13-column columnar pad, with its fine horizontal and vertical lines.  He would commence accounting.

I don’t think any other father in our neighborhood brought their work home with them. 

My brothers and I got to see Dad’s work up close, but his work wasn’t very interesting.  Deep down inside I wished that my father would abandon his pencils and columnar pad and take up a different career, such as stock car racing or lion taming.

When I was nine years old, I was snooping through my father’s wallet and found a T-Man ID card.  

My father a T-Man?  Just like Dennis O’Keefe on the radio?  T-Men were special agents of the US Treasury Department.  On the T-Man radio show, Dennis O’Keefe was a skilled fighter against crime and a relentless enemy of the underworld.

Could my father have been some sort of mild-mannered Clark Kent accountant who had to bring his work home because he was too busy fighting crime during the day to get his accounting done at the office?

Somehow, my nine-year-old mind thought it was more likely that this T-Man ID was a fake, something given to my father as a joke.

When I was sixty-eight years old, I heard a children’s song: “My Father Is An Accountant”.  The song was by Peter Himmelman, who is married to Maria Dylan, and is, therefore, Bob Dylan’s son-in-law.  Peter sang about how he used to think his own father was dull because he was an accountant, but now he knows his father is a hero.

Peter Himmelman realized that his father is a hero because of what his father really did; his father spent his whole life taking care of his wife and kids.

So did my father.  My father was a hero. 

My father didn’t race stock cars; he didn’t tame lions.  He was an accountant.  However, I never found out if he secretly was a relentless enemy of the underworld, and I never found out what tools he took to Camp Fix-Up Day.

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Here is a 3-minute video of Peter Himmelman singing "My Father Is An Accountant":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbLoVOBx-eM

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com