“I’ll just have me a little heart attack.”

Years before Fred Sanford started his manipulative chest-clutching, I utilized that phrase whenever I wanted to get my childish way. Family anecdotes of that youthful threat weren’t quite so cute when my father died of a massive heart attack, 25 years ago this month.

Obviously, I meant no malice when unknowingly trivializing cardiac events; but it’s the sort of memory that can haunt you — if you let it. All of us have uttered things we later regretted, but focusing on the positive side of our relationships is better than beating yourself up.

Yes, I choose to focus on the positive side of my father’s life. I think about his 17 years as a Webelos Scout leader, the lessons he delivered as an adult Bible class teacher and the factoids he absorbed from the Civil War books I gave him on Father’s Day and his birthday.

I appreciate the nights he would show up an hour before closing at the convenience market where I worked solo during high school, just in case there was another hold-up. I remember how he (allegedly intentionally) pronounced “wounded” to rhyme with “sounded.” I remember how he told a radio reporter that he “took evasive action” when a small twister hit the neighborhood. I remember how he would elicit an explanation with “Elucidate, man — elucidate!” I remember that someone saw him working a crossword puzzle in ink at a local diner and asked him, “What’s a nine-letter word for someone who works crosswords in ink?”

“Conceited,” Dad fired back.

I remember how he could switch between quoting Shakespeare (“Is this a dagger which I see before me?”) and quoting the 1940s radio comedy “Duffy’s Tavern.” (“Duffy’s Tavern, where de elite meet to eat. Archie de manager speakin’…Duffy ain’t here. Oh, hello, Duffy.”)

I remember his stories of his one-year stint in the United States Army, including when he showed up for his physical in December of 1945. In addition to all the customary poking and prodding, he had to sit at a table facing two stuffed-shirt officers who bombarded him with a bunch of foolish questions. Dad answered them in the same spirit. One officer whispered to the other, “I think he is, too; but let’s take him, anyway.”

Later, one of the other draftees struck up a conversation with Dad and asked, “So, what did you think of those two PSYCHIATRISTS?”

Dad endured his share of setbacks and heartaches (the internet assures me the Tyree family motto is “Per Ardua,” meaning “through difficulties”), but I choose to remember the biggest spontaneous laugh that ever erupted from him. In the late 70s, NBC attempted a reboot of the once-popular “Laugh-In” series. One performer asked another, “Do you smoke after you make love?” The tentative answer was, “I don’t know. I’ve never looked.”

In the meantime, I’m going to be proactive about my own health by analyzing all the tricks my son Gideon utilized to obtain sympathy when he was a toddler.

I want to make sure he never threatened anything like “I’ll just get run over by a bus” or “I’ll just choke on an undercooked fajita” or “I’ll just get crushed by a mob of adoring readers” or…

Copyright 2025 Danny Tyree, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Danny Tyree welcomes email responses at tyreetyrades@aol.com and visits to his Facebook fan page “Tyree’s Tyrades.”