My Pops

For the final member of my immediate family we come to the anticipated story of my father. First, before we get into this I feel it important that we get a visual of my father's facial expressions as he reads this blog. Now, keep in mind he has no idea what is going to be written about him, but my father doesn't like not knowing what is going to be said about him so his facial expression will be this. The only thing you have to concentrate on is is eyes and eyebrows. I guarantee that while reading this he has his left eyebrow lifted up and his right eyebrow scouring down in a "you better be careful what you say look". Can you picture it? Well, this look is a famous one in our family and has been for many generations. I remember as a kid that you did not want to get that look because it meant you were tailing the line of trouble. Now, if you got the eyebrow look along with the c tightened lips than you better run. The eyebrow, however, has been passed down from generation to generation. My aunts and uncles use it, my grandma uses it, and I am sure her parents and grandparents used it as well. I remember as kid, I could not get my eyebrow to raise up like that without both of them raising. So what did I do? I spent most of my time in class training my eyebrow to raise on its own. Yes, my grades did suffer because of this but it was worth it.

My Pop is a great guy. He cares most in this world about his kids and luckily for me he will do a lot for us. He tends to come in handy, especially on the technology side of things. However, sometimes this love for his kids sometimes came to bite him in the butt. Let me share a story of how we used my father our own personal punching bag as kids.

Now, in order for this to make sense I have to explain how in the world kids could use there father as a punching bag. Wasn't he bigger than you? Yes, he was, but only until we hit about 13. My Dad is 100% Mexican/Spanish whatever you want to call it and 28 years ago when I was born, boy, was he big and MEXICAN. I look at pictures from back when I was a baby and look at my Dad and wonder how long it took him to hop that fence, or swim across that ocean. Now, before you get all huffy puffy I'm also Mexican so I can make racial comments. However, the older he gets the whiter he gets its actually quite amazing, but also with age he shrinks. So, this allowed us to beat on him. So as kids we didn't understand the term "too far" so someone would end up getting hurt. One sunny day my pop asked me to take out the garbage, so instead of doing it right away I decided I will go behind him and give him a great big bear hug for allowing me to take out the garbage. As I am bear hugging him I get really excited to take out the garbage so I decide lets lift him in the air so he understands my excitement for this trip with the garbage cans. Now, I have good jeans which makes me super strong kind of like a super hero, so as I lift my pop into the air and squeeze there might have been a couple ribs cracking. I heard a big loud pop and watch as my pop(haha) falls to the ground in pain. "Whoops, I'm going to go take out the garbage now!". It turns out I broke one of his ribs. It also turns out that maybe 5 years later my younger brother Ruben will do the same thing. It was an accident so don't make him out to be the martyr just yet he did get us back, but not in the way you would think.

A couple years pass by this breaking the ribs incident and I am coming of age, so what does every son look forward to with his father.....THE SEX TALK! Oh yes, now, I don't know if my brothers had the pleasure of going through this talk with my father, but let me tell you, revenge is best served cold and he knew that. Now, I am not going to go into detail on what he said, I am sure you can all use your imaginations but lets just say as uncomfortable as he seemed to be with it all he probably went out of his way to make it more uncomfortable. Word of advice to all you fathers and future fathers. When talking to your sons about sex, please do not use slang words or use hand motions, it will scar you kid for life.

Like I said my Pops is a great and funny guy and can take a joke most of the time( Que raised eyebrow), because when my brothers and sister get together with him he is usually at the butt end of our jokes. Why? because we love him.

So next week I haven't decided if I will move on to extended families as a whole because let me tell you, both sides have some great stories on their craziness, or if I should tell some good stories. See you then.