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Weird things my
father used to say

'The Old Trapper" would have been 82 years old in a couple of weeks. He died 15 years ago leaving many questions unanswered, not the least of which is why he referred to himself as "The Old Trapper."

As I pondered Dad's impending birthday it occurred to me that he said a lot of things I never understood. He called himself "The Old Trapper" so often that my brothers and I just took it for granted that he was "The Old Trapper," even though he wasn't very old and, as far as we could see, never trapped anything.

As a career Air Force pilot, Col. Chuck Memminger used a lot of flying jargon around the house. We boys were often "grounded" after committing some breach of the rules. For kids who never flew much, we were grounded a lot.

I was grounded usually for not "getting with the program." Dad was always telling me to "get with the program," but I never really understood what the program was. The "program" seemed to be the opposite of everything I was doing.

When I tried to explain why I wasn't "getting with the program," he'd usually say something like, "Don't give me that who shot John." I got the gist of that ("shut up"), but didn't actually know what "who shot John" meant. I recently tried to look it up on the Internet and it seems that no one knows why "don't give me that who shot John" is synonymous with "don't make excuses."

When he wasn't obsessed with who shot John, Dad was telling me to "knock off the malarkey." Again, I knew the gist of it ("shut up"), but to this day don't know if "malarkey" is animal, vegetable or mineral.

When warning us not to misbehave, Dad would say, "You do that and it will be Sally bar the door." Sally was always barring doors at our house, even though there was no Sally to be seen. Dad made Sally barring doors sound so scary, we never had the guts to ask him who Sally was and why she had this predilection to bar doors.

Probably the weirdest thing Dad said that I didn't understand was "okie-dokie Dinah Sokey." He said that when things were going well, or in other words, rarely. Like Sally, we knew of no Dinah Sokey lurking around the premises. I often wondered if maybe it was Dinah Sokey who shot John. Or if Sally hadn't barred the door, maybe Dinah Sokey and John wouldn't have gotten into it in the first place.

Happy Birthday, Old Trapper. And that's no malarkey, whatever the hell that is.