EULOGY
My Father, The Underdog
A memorial for David Malcolm McCarty (1942–2022)
If you would like to read my father’s obituary, which I also wrote, you can read that here. Below is what I read at his memorial service which you can watch here.
I used to say that my father was the cheapest white man in North America.
This was actually a line I’d stolen from some comedian or writer I no longer remember the source of. I’m not even sure why race and geography entered into the equation but it always struck me as a funny line.
The truth is, he wasn’t really that cheap.
He was not miserly with his money. Nor was he stingy with his love and affection. Not tight-fisted with his patience and compassion, or mean with his praise.
But my God, did that man love a bargain.
He once bought, and wore, a pair of brightly colored pants, simply because they were a high-end brand name and he’d acquired them for something like $7. He would practically beg you to ask him how much he paid for them. Truth be told, no one was ever shocked by the answer. To the rest of us, they looked like $7 pants. But to my father, they were evidence of winning a game no one else even knew they were playing. A rigged game where winning meant beating the…
