“No C’s, babe.”
They were three little words written on the Christmas card from my father in 1991. He also wrote that he was proud of me and grateful to be my dad. But the last line, underlined several times, was glaring: “No C’s, babe.”
By 1991, my sophomore year of high school, my brother and I were accustomed to high standards when it came to school. Dad wanted us to do well and win in sports and he was always supportive, but he was far more concerned with grades.
For decades, I endured him telling the story of how his oldest son, the one with a master’s degree, nearly failed kindergarten. The story came with his distinctive big laugh.
“When I went in to see his teacher, she wanted to hold him back another year,” he would say. “She basically said he wasn’t overly bright. I told her it was nonsense and to move him to first grade so he could stay with his friends.”
First grade in Anderson, Missouri, wasn’t much better. I had a great teacher, Mrs. Robinson, who got me a notch above failing. I vaguely remember being proud to bring home a report card that had all C’s and a couple of D’s. That was essentially how I rolled in the second grade. I have a hunch the old man cut me some slack because he and my mother divorced as I started kindergarten.
Mom came back and my parents worked it out before we moved to Lebanon, Missouri, in 1984. With the family unit back in place, expectations in the classroom were much higher after third grade, when my report cards were loaded with B’s and the occasional A.
But I didn’t have a full understanding of just how important our education was to Dad until fourth grade when I got my first, gasp, C in more than a year. The rest of the report card was A’s and B’s. I got one little C+ in Social Studies. My brother, in second grade at the time, had all A’s and B’s. Dan got a five-dollar bill. I did not. I spent the next hour sobbing in my bed.
“Son, I did not mean to upset you,” Dad said. “I love you. I know you can do better and will do better. I do not think you are an average boy, and C’s are average.”
Rest assured, I got my five-dollar bill every quarter for the next several years.
Enter high school and enter a ridiculous grading system at Burlingame High in the early 1990s. During my freshman and sophomore year, you had to receive a 94 percent or higher to get an A, an 84 percent or higher to get a B and so on. I’d slid by several times through the years with an 80 percent to get a B-, which typically resulted in a “That’s cutting it close, son.”
At least twice during my freshman year, I got an 83 percent, the dreaded C+. That meant I didn’t get any money, but I was far more concerned with girls and driving around Burlingame’s iconic brick road downtown than I was about being rewarded for a good report card.
That changed the first quarter of my sophomore year when I brought home another C during the first quarter. Never mind the money, which Dad learned wasn’t that big of a deal anymore, he just took my car, a near-mint condition 1971 Monte Carlo.
“You don’t want to work in class, you walk to school,” he said.
As much as I hated walking to class, especially in the frigid Kansas winter, that message didn’t register immediately. It didn’t help that I was really struggling emotionally as a sophomore. I’d started putting on weight a few years after getting in shape and was disengaged from my friends.
A typical day for me was slogging through school while not paying attention, not doing homework, playing video games, watching TV and sitting on the roof of our house smoking a cigarette here or there. Nobody knew I was tried out cigarettes for about six weeks. In fact, nobody knew that until this blog.
Toward the end of the semester, I’d more or less given up. My mom was out of town working a Christmas show, and I didn’t feel comfortable talking to the old man about my “problems” at this point (that seems silly now). Dad left for work early every day, so I took advantage first by sleeping in and rolling into school for second or third hour, then by skipping class entirely.
I finally got busted after a missing three days in a row when my father made a surprise trip home from his shop in Lyndon not long after I’d woken up late.
“Son, what are you doing here? I called the school and they said you haven’t been there for three days and you’ve missed several days,” Dad said. “What’s wrong?”
I should have opened up. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I just told him I didn’t want to be there. He wasn’t mean about it, but he told me to get my ass to school. I realized as I walked the four blocks to Burlingame High that the old man probably hadn’t called the school. I suspect years later that the school secretary (now a relative by marriage) or a couple of teachers (one now my mother-in-law) called my dad.
That night, I realized just how far behind I was. My dad had a long list of assignments I needed to finish, provided by the school. It seemed like the “War and Peace” of lists. There were dozens of drawings for Drafting, 20 pages for Typing, and much, much more.
I did the best I could to catch up in two weeks. The pressure seemed unbearable. As finals week approached, the grades were, well, not good: One A, one B, two C’s, three D’s and one F. I knew at that point, there was no way in hell I was getting my car back.
Nonetheless, I feared the consequences of any report card with a D on it. I figured that rested somewhere between being kicked out of the house or shipped off to military school. As such, I worked my ass off that weekend and during finals week, staying up until 3 a.m. every night, sleeping three hours, studying more and going to finals.
The results of the finals: All A’s, expect Geometry, which I never understood and never will, and Home Ec. The final in the latter wasn’t a true final. It was a final project, a locker pocket, which I half-assed. Hey, something had to suffer in that last week.
By the time it was all said and done, I had one A, two B’s and five C’s. While relieved, I knew that wasn’t going to go over well. And I knew he was going to be upset when I read those three little words: “No C’s, babe.”
In the days after Christmas, I anxiously waited for the old man to get home from the shop. I knew on one of those days he was going to get the report card in the mail. I’ll never forget him walking up to me, giving me the report card, looking at me, and putting his finger in my chest: “Don’t ever do this again.”
He was mad, but he talked to me for a long time that night. He asked what was wrong and what he could do to help. Just hearing him say that helped. My grades did get better, though I got a C in freaking Geometry and an 83 percent in English the next quarter. I begged my English teacher to cut me some slack or I’d lose my car.
“You should have done better to keep your car,” the teacher, now my mother-in-law all these years later, said.
Dad gave me a break and let me drive the Monte Carlo three school days a week and on weekends. It was a good compromise. It was also the last time I got a C in high school.
“No C’s, babe.”
Part III: Mortal Kombat and burritos