Editor’s note: for the next two weeks we’ll be running the best of our This Ordinary Day pieces. We’ve enjoyed working with so many great writers and wonderful people and felt it was high time to take a look back at some of what they’ve brought us. If you’d like to see more pieces, please take a trip over to our archives page — it’ll be well worth your time.

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My dad loves all aspects of fatherhood, but I think his favorite is scaring his children.

As a young man, Dad was a prankster. He has countless stories of playing tricks on his brothers and friends as a teenager and twentysomething. As a dad, Dad had a few more things in his favor: His victims were young, innocent and believed everything he said. Also, “The X-Files” was on when all but I were of prime scaring age. Our TV was in the basement, which was unfinished in the ’90s. The basement had a cement floor, was freezing cold and its back room had several creepy closets, including one with the furnace and pipes that quivered and made abrupt noises.

Dad proved to be adept at mimicking the sounds of the X-Files monsters, a skill he loved to employ as my siblings would be trembling up the stairs to go to bed. One night he mock-rampaged up behind them, making the sound of the Fiji mermaid, a monster that sounded like a cross between a banshee and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. After that, they were scared to go into the basement and upstairs, leaving just one-third of the house fear-free. Luckily, it was the third with the kitchen.

But monsters were nothing next to doctors. Dad is famous for the line he’d utter whenever one of us would have to go to the doctor. “They take a needle THIS long,” he’d say, holding his index fingers about a foot apart, “and as thick as a pencil.” Here he’d pause, re-emphasize the imaginary needle with his fingers, and speak slowly: “And they stick it … right … in … your … eye.”*

The doctor thing was classic, but Dad’s legacy is his stories. He has a knack for describing things to kids with captivating brevity and such simple but compelling language that they completely understand and are petrified. I remember being at dinner and him pointing to a plate and saying that in Africa, in banana trees, there were spiders that big, which would jump out at banana pickers. He didn’t even need to say “RIGHT IN THEIR FACES,” because he knew that the picture we had in our heads was of some cheery farmchild reaching up for bananas and a fierce werewolf of a spider leaping on his head and sucking out his blood in two gulps, probably through his eye.

Dad’s warning before we went to the pool used a different kind of fear. “Water. Doesn’t. Care,” he would say — and that was all, a little seed of a warning. But on the way to the pool it had time to grow, and by the time we got there, we imagined cruel, uncaring water rushing around a flailing, shrieking child — and suddenly, the deep end didn’t seem like such a good idea.

And that was just the nonfiction. His top two bedtimes stories were “The Man in the Wall,” about a person who becomes a homicidal maniac after his construction buddies brick him into a wall; and “The Witch of Eastborough Lake,” whose title character kidnaps children and keeps them in her underwater palace.

I thought that I was a lot better than that, that I had evolved. Then one day a student pointed to a switch. “Can I turn off the light?” she asked.

“No,” I said. And then it fell out of my mouth: “I don’t want the zombies to come out.”

She laughed, but a little nervously. “Zombies?”

“Oh yeah, as soon as you turn off the light, they pour in through the vent,” I said, tapping the metal slats. “And then they collect in a pool on the floor and rise up as zombies, but by then I’m usually out of here.”

She wanted it to be a joke, but her face was hesitating. She was scared.

“That’s why, if you ever see me leave, I lock the door and run,” I said. “Now, here, let’s color.”

*Tables really turned on Pops, though, when he had a (don’t worry, benign) brain tumor a few years ago and endured a footlong syringe before surgery.

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