For Allen

I wanted to share the piece that I read at the memorial service:

Light-activated falling spiders. Singing Christmas trees. A quacking pen. These are just some of the pranks Allen played on me over the years. He had quite the sense of humor. It took me at least two years to get used to the constant jokes and pranks. For example, with dead-pan seriousness, he convinced me that Yuengling was a beer imported from China, and I watched as Eric and Steph shook their heads at my gullibility. Once, he even tricked me into thinking he was poisoning himself by drinking the “jewelry cleaner” we were using to clean our rings. (Turns out it was only vodka!) In fact, as I was writing this, I reached for some chapstick and found instead a tube of “Chicken Poop,” a gift Allen gave me for Christmas last year (though the label assures me it’s actually chapstick, not poop!). He always found ways of bringing a smile to my face, even at the most trying times.

Allen taught his son well. Early in our relationship, Eric told me, with the deadpan seriousness of his father, that the “jackalope” stuffed head mounted at Texas Roadhouse was a real animal in Texas—In Texas (I had never been), he said, even the rabbits have horns. With the skill of his father, he had me convinced until we got home and I could Google the term “jackalope” to confirm that I had, in fact, been duped.

But that was Allen: always bringing joy to others. You could always count on him with a joke or a prank to lighten the mood. In fact, as I was scanning pictures for the slide show that played earlier, I was feeling a little down, and something he had written years earlier cheered me up: I had found one of the first pictures he and Steph had taken of me and Eric. I flipped it over to check the date, and there was written, in Allen’s handwriting: 2001: Eric finds a parakeet. The “parakeet” was me, of course. It was a little joke he and Eric had, and I could just imagine him writing it, with deadpan seriousness, chuckling to himself at the fact that someone, sometime in the future, would fall victim to his little prank.

But that was Allen: always bringing joy to others. His selflessness was apparent as we searched through pictures for the slide show. Through hundreds of pictures, we found only a fraction of them featured him. The reason was: Allen was always the one behind the camera, the one capturing the memories and happiness of others. He took meticulous care of his loved ones the same way he cared for his watches and clocks. But the pictures of him that we did find made it obvious: he cared for Steph and Eric very much, and the sparkle in their eyes, the way their eyes drew to him in each of the pictures, like he was the light of their lives, is evidence enough of the type of husband and father he was.

And it’s clear that he was so proud of his son... and I know Eric would like to say a few words.