Below you will find a free chapter from my book Smooth Living (2013). In the paid user section below the chapters you will find some additional stories, useful notes, and commentary on how my views might have changed since I wrote this more than a decade ago. Upgrade from free subscription to get that and more.
~CD (To see what I’m up to now, come find my daily updates at Xcrol.com
Since he’s dead now, I’m tempted to leave this part out. However, it’s a part of the book, so I’m not going to. As always I wish things had gone differently with him. This was how it went though. As I read this in 2026, it sounds petty - it is. I was deeply hurt. Again.
You may remember my father and I had stopped speaking when I ‘ruined the family name’ by writing Rough Living.
At this point, it had been six years and the ice had thawed. I’d seen him at my sister’s wedding and we had talked briefly. I’d left a few meaningful personal items at his house while I traveled.
Before I left Hawaii, I mailed my tax and identity documents, some heirlooms, keepsakes and a few other souvenirs from life to his house in Arizona - because he’s the kind of guy who has more than one. Part of our relationship issues had always been that his number one priority is him and as his son, I thought maybe I should have some priority.
For instance, when he said he would do something, I thought he should do it.
His thinking on that, was he should do it - as long as it didn’t inconvenience him in any way.
I called him when I arrived back in Bellingham and he suggested I should come pay a visit. He’d built a big contracting business in California over the years and my sister told me that he wanted to pass it on to someone. My sister didn’t want it and my brother and I weren’t on speaking terms with him.
He had foreclosed on an apartment building and small commercial center he’d bought in the Southern California town where we’d lived before he and my mom had divorced, Big Bear Lake. When I called, he was remodeling it and was also in the process of foreclosing on a laundromat he’d sold a few years earlier.
Yes, he’s that guy. He owns lots of stuff.
He’s a great golfer and all his buddies like him - of course he does seem to get new buddies every couple of years.
He offered me five months work for a good wage, a place to stay, and the chance to rebuild our relationship. He didn’t offer that last bit, that was me being hopeful. It’s the whole reason I accepted. I could have found a job in Bellingham. I knew I should say no.
Based on past experience, I knew how it would end. But he was my father and I wanted to believe him. I knew it was a mistake, but I was in a pickle since the kayak job had disappeared and I had that glimmer of hope that we could become close and fix our relationship.
So I agreed. I bought a ticket from Seattle to San Diego and he came and met me at the airport. For a guy in his seventies he looked good. Spending time on the golf course and swinging a hammer every day had kept him looking young and fit. He looked more like he was in his fifties than his seventies.
The first few weeks were great. I had my Dad back. We had a great time together, it was fun. Then his wife came to join us. Everything changed dramatically.
I’m not positive what happened after that - it was a combination of him nit-picking my work and me becoming increasingly defensive about it. As kids, my brother, my cousins, and I nicknamed him the nit-picker. He’d given us all jobs at some point and we’d all either quit or been fired by him as he nit-picked his way through our work.
Nothing was ever good enough for him. That part of him had been absent from this job site. We lived in the apartment we were remodeling. We cooked together, told stories, had a nice time.
When his wife arrived from Arizona, it was strange. Why did she want to leave her nice house and come live in a construction site? Anyway, I was kicked out of the functional apartment and told to stay in the one that was still getting a lot of work done in it. There was an extra bedroom in the nice apartment I’d been staying in but now I was pushed into a stripped out construction zone with an air mattress.
I had better digs when I was couchsurfing. I guess it was better than the big soft pile of dirt in Canada, but not by much.
He and his wife had a car but they wouldn’t let me use it. They could go shopping, go away, or take a few days off - I was stuck in the apartment building with no way to go get groceries except shopping at the convenience store or walking three miles to the grocery store. I couldn’t go visit friends, or get away from the job site if I needed to in a convenient way.
I bought a $10 bicycle, but in a mountain town - it wasn’t enough. A few childhood friends came into town and he seemed incredibly bothered that I had the nerve to ask for a day or two off. He wanted me to work every day.
Before the nit-picking began in earnest, I actually thought our relationship had improved. I thought he had changed. I wanted him to be proud of me, so I decided to order him a copy of each of my books as a Father’s Day gift.
I don’t know why I ever thought it was a good idea. I wanted to believe he’d grown up. I was wrong.
As soon as I told him, the old wounds about me writing about my life rose up. It wasn’t as if I had written about him, but he was offended we had the same last name.
He was ashamed of me!
Not only that, he was pissed about it. The nit- picking became worse after that and at that point, I confess, I began to respond to him just like I’d respond to any asshole boss. He’d gripe and complain and I would slow down and reduce my output, intentionally make mistakes, and respond with sarcasm.
One month into it - he knocked on my door at 6:30 in the morning after we’d had a brief argument the night before about me taking the 4th of July off to go barbecue with my childhood friend.
He handed me a check and told me to go away. He didn’t say “You’re fired!” He said “Take all your things and go away right now. Don’t come back.”
I was fired and evicted and I had no backup plan. I told him I needed a day or two and he told me I needed to go within the hour or he would call the police. I was flabbergasted and hurt. I threw what possessions I couldn’t carry on my back into his dumpster, put on my shoulder bag, and rode my $10 bicycle down the 7000 foot mountain he’d brought me up to work for him.
So Long Nit-Picker!
I’d always wanted to do that bike ride. It was terrifying and ridiculously fun, especially because my brakes weren’t so good on that old ten speed.
Another childhood friend called and asked if I wanted to go get a drink. She lived in Palm Springs and was on her way to go up the mountain. As luck had it, she was passing right by where I was, Lucerne Valley.
I wasn’t really prepared to ride a twenty year old ten-speed through Death Valley and Joshua Tree without any supplies. She picked me up and we went back up the mountain to her parent’s place. My old ten speed stayed parked at a diner in Lucerne.
I stayed with her family for a few days and then went to stay with my uncle in Palm Springs. Being the Nit-Picker’s brother, he simply asked me “Didn’t you realize this was going to happen?”
Yeah, I had, but it was done and so we didn’t talk about it any further.
I spoke with my brother and he pointed out that I needed to go get my possessions from my father’s house as soon as possible. It had been foolish of me to think I could leave them there. That’s what kids do with their parents though, right? I think that was what I was looking for.
When my father and my brother had fallen out some years before, the Nit-Picker threwall of my brother’s things into the garbage. Boxes of trophies, his high school diploma, photos. The Nit-Picker didn’t care.
As kids, the Nit-Picker found our rooms too dirty and gave us each two 55-gallon garbage bags and told us to fill them with all of our toys. Then he threw them out. He threw out all of our toys.
I felt pretty certain he would do the same with my things as soon as he got back to Arizona.
It was a month before I was able to arrange a way to get to his Arizona house to get my documents, keepsakes, and heirlooms. I had to arrange it through his wife’s sister who lived down the street from them. She called and told them. I was halfway there when he called and told me it wasn’t possible and I should go back to my brother’s house in Utah.
I went anyway. His wife’s sister supervised to make sure I wasn’t taking anything besides what was mine. I was polite on the phone because I had to be. That was the last I spoke to him for five years.
I was deeply hurt and having never learned from him that men shouldn’t be petty, I wrote up the whole thing and broadcast messaged it to everyone I knew with the last name Damitio. Ashamed of me for writing? Guess what?
I broke that commandment about honoring my father. If the God of Abraham exists, I’m going to hell but I’m sure I’ll see the Nit-Picker there.
Nothing but broken promises and broken vows existed with him. His life was littered with them.
I’m not perfect, but when I tell someone I’m going to do something, I do it. When I borrow money, I pay it back. And if I ever make a promise to my kid, you can be sure I’ll keep it. The reason why is because I know how much it hurts when the person you should be able to trust above all others demonstrates again and again you don’t matter. It hurts.
That’s all I have to say about that.
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