46. Bumper Sticker Shit

Author’s note: This post started out as an idea I had where I was going to talk about a bumper sticker idea I had the other day, but then this all spilled out. I LOVE it when that happens.

My dad, the late great James Joseph McKibben of Denver, Colorado, used to randomly drop bumper sticker slogans he’d come up with on my brother and me, usually after coming into the house after a long day of work and an almost equally long commute home through Houston rush hour traffic. Or he’d drop them on us as we’d pass food around the table at dinner time. We’d be scooping warmed up canned green beans onto our plates and he’d get this twinkle in his eye and a half smile on his lips that always indicated what was coming next. I think my dad would have been a poor poker player.

If I’m being completely honest, most of the stuff my dad came up with was not altogether all that memorable or really all that clever. If you’ve seen the movie Office Space, most of his bumper sticker slogans were along the same vein as the man who invented the “jump to conclusion mat.” In other words, they were kind of corny, somewhat forgettable, but they did have a little depth to them if you sat with them for a bit. “No matter where you go, there you are” was a common one from him.  

My dad worked for a marketing and sales company that made all kinds of amazing little things that companies give out to clients and potential clients. All those little pens that have company logos on them that are now sitting in your junk drawer or outdated Normal Rockwell themed calendars with company contact information along the bottom that still hang on the wall in your garage despite being two years out of date were the types of things his company specialized in.

A common treat for my brother and I would be when we’d accompany him to work, he’d let us go into the company supply closet to select some items to take back home with us. It was like the world’s lamest Willy Wonka chocolate factory, only instead of tasty chocolatey treats we’d leave with cool post-it notes pads or corporate branded whoopee cushions. So, for us, the idea that dad could turn his bumper sticker ideas into actual physical bumper stickers was never out of the realm of possibilities.

Sadly, because his slogans were kind of forgettable, because we were shortsighted teens (is there another kind?) and because we ignorantly assumed he’d be in our lives for several more decades instead of just the one additional one he gave us, we didn’t write any of them down, nor can my brother or I recall any of them now. Whatever bumper sticker thoughts he had and expressed out loud but didn’t end up acting on before he died got sent back to wherever in the netherworld such ideas like these originate in the first place. Premium ideas like unused ideas for novels, paintings that die in the imagination before they can make it canvas, or any other major spark of creativity that feels worthy of substance get put on the top shelf where anyone can draw from them, whereas unused bumper sticker slogans get put on the bottom shelf where dad jokes and memes originate.

Or the same well I occasionally draw from when I come up with bumper sticker expressions of my own. Perhaps coming up with little one- or two-line sentences that would work on a bumper sticker is something that is passed on in the genes like the Force through the Skywalker family. “My father has it, I have it. My (dramatic pause) sister has it.”

Because I’m a through-and-through Gen X’er, I’m contractually obligated to add the suffix “shit” to anything I’m working on. So, every time I’m walking across the parking lot and a bumper sticker idea pops into my head, I laugh in my head and say, “oh it’s that bumper sticker shit again.”

Or perhaps this is just the fate of all dads everywhere. You either go down the dad joke route or down the bumper sticker route. Or if you’re clever enough, you get both routes like some kind of bizarro dad version of the trolley problem.

Forgettable or amazing? Corny or deep? What I wouldn’t give to hear just one more of his bumper sticker slogans. When loved ones are no longer with us, we always go to the big things that we miss. We miss the hugs. Or we miss the conversation about God-knows-what that end up informing a major chunk of our life. Or we think about the graduations they weren’t at, the Astros World Series they never got to watch, or the grandkids they never got to hold.

But we remember the little stuff so much more sporadically, even though everyday life is made up of one thousand “little things” strewn together. Pixar’s Inside Out nailed this. You get your core memories but most of the brain is the little stuff. Like the time he’s kind of freaking out because he’s teaching you to drive, and you almost hit a curb. Or the time I asked him if “Oasis was the new Beatles” and he answered with a “I’ve never heard of Oasis, so the answer is no… back in 1964 literally everyone in the country knew who the Beatles were” (SICK BURN!).  Or the numerous times he’d come home from work and ask me to take his shoes off for him while he sits on the couch. Or the 1,000 times he’d either pick me up from band or baseball practice. Or, yes, the 100 little dumb bumper sticker slogans that he came up with but are now just as gone as he is.

I think that’s what people mean when they say to cherish the little things. Life is made up of little things. There you go, dad. A bumper sticker slogan for you.