Columnist Sally Jenkins writes on the death of her father, Dan: My father made me laugh, and now I have a problem
By Sally Jenkins Sally Jenkins Sports columnist Email Bio Columnist March 9 at 3:08 PM Dan Jenkins wrote, “You have to laugh trouble down to a size where you can talk to it.” But the loss of a father, a good father, is very big trouble, and he was the one person who could laugh that down to size for me. As his daughter, I’m here to tell you he was full of as much wit in person as he was in print. You see my problem.
Yet in my estimation, he was a better father than nine-tenths of those I knew. Granted, growing up I thought everybody’s father drank 10 cups of coffee and smoked three packs a day, and wrote novels on vacations, and got hate mail from Notre Damers, and wore Gucci loafers with no socks, and swore like a janitor every time he put up the Christmas tree, and became the most influential sportswriter of his generation.
Roughly three hours later a surgeon emerged to tell us the good news that he had required only a triple. When my father heard this, he grinned through his tubes.Even on the morning I was born, seven minutes ahead of my brother, my father sized up the situation and decided, at arguably the most profound moment of his life, that it was rich with sporty one-liners.
At some point on an old South Carolina interstate, I mentioned to him that I thought I’d like to be a pompom girl.I learned on these trips that my father’s fabulous wit cloaked some qualities in him that were less obvious. The quiet integrity and concentration with which he approached good writing. His fidelity to his family. A buried, subtle religiosity.
“Your Dad made me laugh and think at the same time,” Tom says. No one has had a truer insight into him.
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