“My Dad the Dictator,” New Era, Sept. 2000, 35
My Dad the Dictator
Typing up my dad’s stories wasn’t my idea of a fun summer vacation.
“You’re kidding, right?” I asked my dad as he dumped a pile of cassette tapes on my desk. “Transcribing all these will take weeks, maybe the whole summer.”
Earlier that week, I had agreed to help him record stories from the emergency room. As an inner-city doctor, my dad is always seeing unusual cases—like a boy with a watermelon seed stuck in his ear and a man who claimed his dandruff and flaking skin were caused by aliens. My family loves to hear his stories, and one day my mom suggested he record them on tape. I volunteered to type them.
This was, of course, before I remembered I was going to be in summer school all day, studying chemistry. After the first week of learning about elements and chemical formulas, the thought of reading, writing, or even thinking outside of school made me sick. I didn’t want to spend two hours a night typing stories. I wanted to do unproductive things like watching TV or playing video games.
“Well, I guess I can find someone else to do it,” said my dad, looking disappointed. “Or maybe we can just put it off for a while.”
I almost said “great” and left, but he looked so crestfallen I couldn’t. “Leave the tapes, Dad. I’ll see what I can do,” I said finally.
Every evening after summer school, I would come home, eat, go running, and head upstairs to the computer. For two hours I would transcribe the tapes, typing at a painfully slow speed because I made so many mistakes. At first I hated it, and my eyes seemed constantly blurred from staring at the screen. But it was easy to get interested in the stories my dad was telling, like the one about an old woman who saved her fingernail clippings in a jar for a year and then brought them in for examination.
One case, in particular, touched me. It was about a boy from Mexico who was dying. When my dad went to see the patient, he found the mother by the boy’s bedside, weeping.
“Hola, Señora Garcia,*“ said my father, who had served a Spanish-speaking mission. Startled to hear Spanish, the woman told my dad she had brought her son from Mexico to receive care. They continued to talk, and the woman told my father she was LDS. As the only LDS emergency room doctor at the hospital—and the only one who spoke Spanish—my dad was able to give the boy a blessing of comfort before he died and help the mother with funeral arrangements.
As I heard my dad bear testimony of the experience, I realized that these tapes were doing more than improving my typing skills. They were improving my relationship with my father. In a funny way, I was getting to know my dad better as I listened to his stories. Soon I couldn’t wait to get home from summer school each day so we could talk about what I had typed the night before. My dad seemed excited, too, that I was interested in this part of his life.
He would frequently come up to me to tell me little things he had forgotten to put in a story. “Did I tell you the male nurse who kept fainting was transferred to pediatrics?” he’d ask, or, “Did I remember to say that the bicyclist who crashed was 83?” And sometimes we would sit and talk for hours—about his job, my schoolwork, anything.
As we talked, I began to realize what a wonderful friend my dad was. In the past, I had been so busy with school and cheerleading that there were days when I barely said hello to him. But the tapes helped me see what I was missing. And once we developed the habit, taking time to talk was easy. We were friends.
Within a month, I had finished transcribing the tapes. “Here you are, Dad,” I said, handing him 38 single-spaced, typed pages.
“Thanks, Elyssa, I hope this didn’t take too much time away from hanging out with your friends,” Dad said.
“Nah, it was actually pretty cool. I’m kind of sad to be done,” I said, smiling. I had been hanging out with a very important friend.
Illustrated by Dilleen Marsh