I See Myself In You

Parenthood is full of surprises.

I’ve been a father for almost ten years now, and in that time I’ve often been surprised by the things I’ve found myself saying, from the oh-god-I’m-that-guy-now admonitions to turn off lights, close doors and stop messing with the thermostat to the I-just-never-thought-that-would-need-to-be-said statements like “don’t put that crocodile down your pants in public”. I’ve been surprised by the places I’ve found myself, the stories I’ve accidentally memorized, and the things I’ve found under the seats of my car. I was surprised the year Jodi Benson topped my Spotify Wrapped because my daughter was really into hearing “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid on the way to pre-school. I’ve been surprised by the movies that make me tear up now, ones that didn’t used to do that. Heck, I’ve been surprised by car insurance commercials doing that.

The biggest surprise, though, might be how much I’ve had to see of myself.

That’s something they don’t tell you: becoming a parent is like installing mirrors all over your house.

I’m not even talking about physical resemblance, though that’s the first and most obvious way it can present itself. My oldest showed up looking just like me from day one, a resemblance remarked on so often that I grew mildly concerned that people thought I looked like a 33-year-old baby.

(They weren’t necessarily wrong, but they shouldn’t say it.)

I’m also not talking about the behavioral tics, though those are certainly there, too, the things that I know I do or once did that I’m startled to see repeated. For instance: I had completely forgotten about the weird way I used to sleep as a kid until I saw my son doing exactly the same thing. (Dead asleep, with one knee up and the other ankle propped up on it, like he’s doing a Figure-Four stretch in the middle of a dream.) When these familiar eccentricities present themselves, I just can’t help but wonder how’d they know to do that?

It’s the learned behaviors that are the most troubling reflections, though.

I can’t blame those on some troublesome quirk of genetics; those are the things that they learned just from being around me.

Like many people, I recoil when hearing my own voice played back to me in a recording; it’s probably a factor in why I could never sustain a podcast. (Society’s loss, I know.) Well, raising kids is a bit like being surreptitiously recorded at all hours, and then having it played back to you when you least expect it. (I had no idea how often I prefaced sentences with “Point being—” until my son started doing it to me.) To a small degree, I suppose it’s flattering, but it can also quickly become exhausting.

“Oh, god, is that what I sound like?”, I remark to my wife after one of our children unspools a pedantic diatribe, and she simply nods ruefully at having endured the same from me for much longer than she’d like to admit.

It’s taken me a few years—and more than a few needless arguments—to realize that the times I get most frustrated with my children are often when they’re reflecting a behavior of my own. Why are you being like this, I want to ask, when I know deep down that it’s me, I’m why. The things we clash over are the things I know they got from me. Of course, I forgive those qualities in them; I love my children unreservedly, and more than I knew I could love anyone before they came into my life.

A large part of parenthood—perhaps the most important part—is learning to act with forgiveness and grace and to love someone for who they are, no matter who they are or how they’re currently driving you mad. It can be difficult if you let it, but if the love comes first, it’s no struggle at all.

Once you’ve accepted that, though, there’s an extra leap you can make.

Once you’ve realized that you love someone for who they are, in spite of—no, including the qualities that you see in yourself—you can start to forgive those things in yourself, and learn to love yourself a little bit more, too.

Parenthood might a house full of mirrors, sure.

But it doesn’t look so bad from that angle, though, does it?

Friends, it’s Friday again at The Action Cookbook Newsletter.

This weekend is Father’s Day, and as an admittedly heavily Dad-Coded newsletter, it’s my time to shine. Today I’m all about The Things Dads Want—from food and drink to music, books and more, the ACBN has what the Dads in your life need, whether they’re actual Dads or simply Dad In Spirit.

[slaps thighs, starts to stand up] It’s Friday. Let’s rock n’ roll.

Dads Want To Give Themselves Heartburn

Contrary to my usual approach, I don’t have a specific recipe here today, but rather the answer to a question: what’s the most Dad meal I could make?

You might have a different answer to this question, but for me, that’s a simple, straightforward cheeseburger. My preferred edition? A double-smash burger, made with a pair of two-ounce beef patties smashed as thin as I could on a cast-iron griddle set over the grill. Two slices of cheese, tomato, lettuce, red onion and something I’ll call “Action Sauce” — a mixture of Duke’s Mayo, Cleveland Stadium Mustard, ketchup, relish and chopped roasted garlic — all together on a sesame-seed bun1 makes for Dad Heaven.

To accompany it, I tossed some freezer-case shoestring French fries with Grippo’s BBQ chip seasoning, which is something you can buy online and absolutely something you should consider using on your fries.

Dads Want To Make a Drink and Then Get on a Weird Historical Tangent That No One Was Asking For

Father’s Day is a special assignment when it comes to brainstorming a cocktail. A Just Good Enough drink won’t do, nor will the standard summer fare. You can’t be any geek off the street; you gotta be handy with the steel, if you know what I mean2.

This occasion—this Day of the Dad—it requires something different. It requires something big, bold and brassy. A cocktail that shakes the walls when it sneezes. A cocktail that can fix a lawnmower simply through cursing. A cocktail that groans a little when it gets out of the chair, but then strides to the backyard, picks up a wiffleball bat, and sends a child’s pitch twenty feet over the back fence before flipping the bat like Jose Bautista in the 2015 ALDS.

I’m getting off track. A Boulevardier—that’s the play.

The classic cocktail is basically a Negroni with the gin swapped out for whiskey. That’s a great start, but I’m not stopping there. First, I’ll add a layer of bittersweet richness by infusing cacao nibs into the Campari—then give it an extra boost by washing the glass with espresso liqueur. Big and bold, just like I said.

I needed a name, though, and that’s where I slip into free-association mode.

Campari. Cacao. Coffee. C’s. The C-Word? No, that’s no good. Hi-C? Different thing. The Seven C’s? But Brain, where are we going to get chili cheese corn chips at this hour, and won’t they get soggy in the drink?

Think. Think. *Three* Cs. 3-C Highway—hey, that’s Ohio State Route 3, the original road from Cleveland to Cincinnati! My ancestral road! It runs as State Street through the Uptown section of Westerville, the Columbus suburb where I attended high school and where my parents still live. Westerville’s best known for its central role in Prohibition, when it was the home base of the Anti-Saloon League, and for being a town where the locals dynamited a local watering hole, Henry Corbin’s saloon, on multiple occasions.

(Seriously, read about the Westerville Whiskey Wars!)

Of course, there’s now multiple brewpubs a stone’s throw from where Corbin’s Saloon once sat, a prospect as unlikely in 1997 (when we moved to town and you couldn’t even buy beer at Kroger) as it was in 1879. The saloonkeepers won, and Henry Corbin got the last laugh.

[blinks, gasps] what happened I blacked out

[looks at hand] hey look I made a drink

Henry Corbin’s Last Laugh

• 1-1/4 ounce Rittenhouse Rye
• 3/4 ounce Cacao-infused Campari (see below)
• 3/4 ounce sweet vermouth
• Caffe Borghetti coffee liqueur, for washing (see note)
• Orange peel

Cacao-Infused Campari

• 1 cup Campari
• 1 tablespoon cacao nibs

Add the cacao nibs to the Campari and allow to soak for 8-12 hours; run through a fine-mesh strainer and discard the nibs.

Note: I used Caffe Borghetti here, but any espresso-type liqueur would work; the key is for it to be a black-coffee type and not a cream-based or heavily-sweetened one.

Pour a small amount of the espresso liqueur into a chilled rocks glass. Swirl it around, then dump it out. Add a single large ice cube. In a separate glass filled with ice, stir the rye, cacao-infused Campari and sweet vermouth, then strain over the ice cube. Express an orange peel over the top, and drop it in.

This is lovely—bold, complex, smooth, and just a little bitter. It’s a perfect drink to sip while judging your neighbor’s lawn-care regimen.

Dads Want To Make a Guest Appearance on a Podcast

I said up top that I don’t like hearing my voice recorded and played back to me, and I mean that—but hey, maybe it won’t bother you as much!

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of making a guest appearance on the long-running college football podcast The Shutdown Fullcast, where we discussed—among other things—a hare-brained proposal I had for adding some spite and spice to the College Football Playoff.

I know many readers here are already Fullcast listeners, but if you’re not, it’s a fun show and it was a fun conversation!

Dads Want to Blare Pop-Punk From the Windows of Their Sensible Mid-Sized SUV

I saw it observed recently—I can’t recall exactly where, so I’ll paraphrase—that now that Gen Z has claimed white New Balances and/or Air Monarchs as ‘cool’ sneakers, the real “Dad Shoes” these days are actually Vans.

This is a sobering realization, and I fear it’s one that has a corollary in music. Dad Rock isn’t Led Zeppelin or Grand Funk Railroad anymore—it’s the bands that fill out the too-honestly-named When We Were Young festival lineup.

Pop-punk is now Dad Rock.

You may need some time to sit with that hard truth, but at the very least it gives me an angle for presenting today’s musical selection, The Jack Knives. Hailing from Orange County, California, they trade in a familiar style of music that—well, I’ll defer to the description my good friend Bill gave in texting me about them a few weeks ago:

Make a band that loves gaslight, bouncing souls, and social d and have them not be embarrassed by ripping all of them off at once.

On my first listen, I absolutely heard each of these bands at distinct moments. That did not trouble me in the least, because I love those bands and I am happy to hear music that sounds like them.

Off their album Into the Night, here’s “Kill Me First”:

Dads Want You to Subscribe to The Action Cookbook Newsletter

Okay, well, this one might just be me. But I do! This is a rare free edition of the Friday Newsletter, but I do good stuff like this every week here at the ACBN, and I can’t sustain it without the support and generosity of Readers Like You.

If you’re only on the free version of the newsletter, please consider upgrading to a full membership! No one has ever regretted it.

(I’m being advised by my legal department that the previous sentence is unverifiable and/or wholly untrue, and you should not have read it.)

Dads Want to Get a Little Emotional Reading a Good Book

This week’s book recommendation comes from a familiar face in this corner of the internet—Will Leitch, longtime internet sportswriter and founder of the late, lamented site Deadspin. Leitch has written a handful of books to date, both fiction and non-fiction, but he’s just dropped a supremely satisfying novel that’s perfect for today’s theme—Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.

The titular protagonist, Lloyd McNeil, is a good cop, one who just wants to serve his Atlanta community and be the best father he can to his thirteen-year-old son, Bishop. This relatively-uncomplicated life is upended by a terminal brain cancer diagnosis; Lloyd is dying, soon, and he realizes that he won’t be able to provide Bishop with the future he wants. He hatches a plan: he’s going to get himself killed in the line of duty, thus securing lucrative survivor’s benefits for Bishop and his ex-wife. The sudden fearless approach that he takes to policing has an unexpected effect, though; it turns him into a viral celebrity.

It’s a well-crafted story, one that moves propulsively and concludes satisfyingly, but that’s not what makes this book so good.

Rather, it’s the musings throughout, presented as a series of letters the dying Lloyd writes to his teenaged son about fatherhood, growing up, and what really matters in life. It’s an easy-reading book—I breezed through it over the course of two days—but it knocked the wind out of me in more than a few places. I really enjoyed this one.

(Reminder: all my Friday book recommendations can be found at my Bookshop page.)

Dads Want to Play a Game But They Do Not Want to Read The Rules

I believe I have mentioned this game in a Friday newsletter before, but after six years of doing this, I’m comfortable repeating myself. Heck, the game has been around for several decades now, so there’s a good chance you’ve already heard of it.

Nevertheless!

I just recently got a new edition of Fluxx, and it’s a wildly-fun card game to play—especially if you’re like me, and you zone out 30 seconds into having the rules of a new game explained to you.

Can’t we just start playing and figure it out as we go?, I’ll beg—and Fluxx is a game where that’s just fine. The basic rules of the game from the start are: draw one card, play one card. That’s it. The twist is that many of the cards you can play put new rules into effect, shifting the grounds on which you’re going to declare victory.

It’s easy for kids to pick up, and no game is the same—they can go on for a while, or end in the blink of an eye. Heck, a couple days ago my son beat me in two turns. He’s claiming that’s a world record, and who am I to rain on his parade?

(I’ll get him back in Mario Kart World later.)

Dads Want To Hear a Good Joke. Or, Even Better, a Bad One

In my Father’s Day edition last year, I solicited your best Dad Jokes. Many of you delivered then, but I’d like to ask that question again—and I promise you that I will use every one of them on my children this weekend.

(Except for any blue ones, I’ll save those for my wife.)

I’m going to extend the question, though, to include Dad Bits. That is, the running bits that you maintain for no other reason than that they entertain you, even if they don’t entertain anyone else. (Especially if they don’t entertain anyone else.)

This is something I’ve addressed here before, too, including my road-trip go-to:

Periodically, I will be driving on the highway with my family, and I will see an RV towing a car or truck behind it. Every time—and I mean every time—I will remark with casual concern “geez, he’s really ridin’ that guy’s bumper over there!”.

It has not made anyone else laugh for years, but it makes me laugh every time.

Lately, I’ve been using one that my own Dad has used as long as I can remember, and that’s to suggest that the inventor of—well, anything, really—is [George + That Thing’s Name].

Dad, who invented Pringles?

Oh, that was George Pringles, of course.

I rolled my eyes at it as a kid, but now that I have kids of my own, I will gladly make theirs roll.

Dads Just Want to Pet That Dog

Truly, who understands a Dad better than a dog—especially if that’s a dog that the Dad was opposed to getting? (I was on board with Olaf, but I did remind my wife a few times in the early Cocaine Velociraptor days that getting him was her idea.)

Today, we’ve got some fine pups lined up.

First, Conor F. has the belle of the ball:

I thought I should contribute to the pet queue since your newsletter is a big reason why we brought a dog into our home in early 2024. Introducing Bella the rescue Doberman - the most good natured cuddle bug. 70lbs of pure dumb love, she’s incredibly patient with the kids and she’s settled really nicely into her home after some initial anxiety. I honestly don’t know how anyone could have surrendered her to the shelter - their loss is our gain. Shown here in her favorite spot perched on the stairs so she can see what we’re cooking and on that day she met the neighbor’s chicken that had escaped. She’s the best.

What a wonderful smile! I love her, and I’m cackling thinking about how any dog I have known would react to a chicken in the yard. (Holly: Murder. Olaf: Terror.)

Great dog.

Finally, Gerald V. has a memorial for a Very Good Dog:

On a sad note, my old timer Crew passed away earlier this spring. I have had a ton of dogs come through my home as I am a frequent foster. I can honestly say there has never been a sweeter dog that this old fella was. Most photos of him involve him laying down because that’s all he wanted in his golden years—a comfy bed. He was a foster fail that was with me for a few years. I wish it was for a few more years.

What a beautiful dog—you can tell just from a picture what a kind soul he was. May his memory be a blessing; thank you for sharing it with us.

That’s it for this week, pals.

I hope you have a great weekend, whatever you have planned.

Just be sure to close the door on your way out—we’re not trying to air-condition the whole neighborhood here, for cryin’ out loud!

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)