Kill Them With Kindness… Or Creepiness

This is a story about my father and his obnoxiousness.

When I was a kid, he used to have a habit of purposely hogging up a parking spot when another car was waiting for him to leave. It didn’t matter if they were honking, rude, or otherwise being impatient. Having a car signal that they were waiting for him was enough to make him put his car in park and just… sit there, not even trying to look busy.

Sometimes people would even come out of their car and to his driver’s side to ask if he was leaving or scream at him about WTF he was waiting for, but he never gave them a reply. He’d just smile at them through the rolled-up window and wave.

He’d claim it was because he “didn’t like being rushed”, but I could tell he enjoyed waiting until he was “ready,” which translated to “whenever the other car got tired and left,” as he’d immediately zoom out right after.

I absolutely HATED it. It would make us late to events or delay us from getting home, and it was scary whenever a red-faced stranger would yell with our whole family in the car. He didn’t care; he would just sit there being smug for no good reason.

That was until one day in my early teens.

We had just gotten out of church (ironic, right?) and had gotten lucky, having parked on the curb right in front of the church. While mingling out front with everyone, I noticed a flower van parked a few spaces away. Every time a car left, it would scoot forward and take their spot. We had heard about there being a funeral service later that day, and I put two and two together and realized they were waiting for our spot in the front.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have said anything – I seemed to have been the only one who noticed, my parents were wrapping up their conversations, and I had zero faith in my dad being a decent person at this point – but I thought if I told my mom, she would be able to shepherd our family away to the car and leave before my dad noticed what the van was doing. Unfortunately, my mom immediately turned around and told Dad, “Hey, we should leave. There’s a lady dropping off flowers for the service later.”

Of course, this just encouraged my dad to strike up a new conversation to stay long enough to see the van actively move forward behind our spot so he could make a show of corraling the four of us to the car, turning it on, then sitting there, staring smugly at the rear view.

I turned around in my seat and made eye contact with the lady driving, who gave a polite smile, which made me feel even worse, so I just sank into my seat and prepared for however long this pointless power trip was going to take.

It only took what felt to be a minute or two before my dad wordlessly pulled out and drove off, which was surprising. More confusing was the silence when my mother asked what was wrong. I hadn’t noticed, as I was sitting right behind him, but my dad had completely lost his smugness and refused to say anything back home.

He never did that habit again. I had thought maybe the coach had arrived or the priest had come out, or maybe he just realized what an absolute dickhead he was being right in front of a church. I never knew the true reason until a few years later.

My maternal grandmother passed away. It was the first death our family really faced, and we held the funeral service at that same church. My parents had (thankfully) divorced since then, but my dad was still invited to pay his respects. Our funeral directors (a husband-and-wife duo) were welcoming everyone who passed by, and when my dad got through the entrance, the wife shook his hand, made eye contact, and BEAMED, stating, “Oh! I remember you! Hi!”

Never in my twenty years have I seen my dad go so pale and speedwalk away from another person. Turns out, the female director was the driver from that day and put the fear of God into him.

How?

By smiling at him. Somehow, or maybe coincidentally, she was able to make eye contact with my dad through the rear-view mirror and smiled… unblinking. Her smile gradually grew wider and wider, her eyes doing the same, the entire time until my father drove away and couldn’t see her anymore. My mom told me she saw the range of emotions happening to my father that day, from smug to a weird mixture of confusion and fear. He finally told her what happened the day afterward because he wasn’t able to process how absolutely bizarre it was. She had thought he was overreacting, but when she saw the wife’s reaction to my father, she understood what he meant by her “crazy eyes.”

Despite the gloomy day that was my grandmother’s funeral, my mother admits that seeing my father crumple at the hands of a seemingly sweet older lady was a highlight of hers.