Madeleine Chapman reflects on the week that was.
It’s easy to believe that all dads are the same. Mums are uniquely complicated and rich with emotions, while dads get neatly parcelled into an easy (and believable) stereotype.
Here are some things about my dad that make me think every dad is the same.
– His preferred cooking appliance is the barbecue
– He has taught himself almost everything about DIY and can fix most things but not before talking about it for weeks
– When I made him a user profile on my Netflix account and accidentally clicked on it two weeks later he’d watched the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan and two different WWII documentaries
– He jingles his keys in his pants pocket 24/7
– When he leaves me voice messages (rare) it sounds like a business call
And yet there is no other dad like Steve Chapman, who answers every phone call in his stubbornly American accent: “[long pause] Steve Chapman…. oh pretty good. Yourself?” He is the funniest person I know and only 10% of the time is it intentional. My brother used to always say, “Mad, you need to write a movie and just have one of the characters be Dad.” No further explanation needed.
When he was 27, my dad met and later married a 32-year-old widow with six children under 10. Thinking about that now makes me laugh so much and I’ve just realised I’ve never thought to ask him… why?
Three of his 10 children now live in Auckland and have, completely organically, started playing the Steve Chapman game. The Steve Chapman game goes like this: in literally every situation you find yourself, there’s a Steve Chapman quote to go with it. Waiting in traffic? There’s a Steve Chapman quote for that. Just tried a new food? There’s a Steve Chapman quote for that. Opening a present? There’s a Steve Chapman quote for that.
They’re not pithy one-liners, but because Steve Chapman said them, they are. We put on our American accents and give our best Dad impression of “I wonder what that tastes like?” and it gets a laugh every time. It’s always a gag but it serves as an easy way for us 30-something-year-old kids to ease into our age. We’re quoting Steve Chapman but we also want to say those things ourselves. Like when I started saying “lol” out loud ironically and now it’s just something I say.
Sometimes I’ll find myself crumbling about something ridiculous or telling a very long story to someone I’ve just met and I’ll think, that’s Steve Chapman.
I should’ve known that I would become my dad sooner rather than later. Happy Father’s Day to all the dads whose characters precede them.
The stories Spinoff readers spent the most time with this week
- Bulletin editor Catherine McGregor outlines why homeownership no longer guarantees a comfortable retirement
- Fonterra has sold Anchor, Mainland and Kāpiti to a French dairy giant. Emma Gleason explains the deal
- A list of other things from 2021 that Christopher Luxon could reannounce from Joel MacManus
- The cost of being: An airline pilot with a ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ financial personality
- Married by 27, old by 66, dead by 83: Alex Casey untangles what New Zealanders expect from ageing
Feedback of the week
“I would support this if we also make it a condition that wealthy foreign house buyers must first complete a 12-month military style boot camp. The programme will be designed to instill personal, social, and environmental responsibility in a demographic notorious for imposing vast costs on the rest of society.”
“As with all things tonsorial, everything depends on the combination of shape of the face (including the shape of glasses frames, and many fringes are cut with the glasses off and the patient unable to see what the hell is happening) and texture of the hair. People with thick bouncy hair, although the envy of those with fine, limp hair should exercise extra caution. Persons with fine, limp hair may find they finally have some bounce and volume around their faces. I used to have a beautiful heavy fringe that curved in a neat arch above my face, artfully cut so that the ends always turned under. I had my work ID photo taken on a day when I wore the rest of my hair in a ponytail and it looks like a bowl cut.”
“I always take my coffee back to bed on Friday mornings and read your column – very sensible, very funny!
From a dater of the Neanderthal era who wishes they were still single and free to take a friend to Splash Planet.”
