An rather long, but necessary, excerpt from a very descriptive and telling piece:

My father is of a generation of men who would never use an umbrella, push a shopping cart or use the phone to socialize. To Dad, the telephone is an instrument for conducting business, even if one of his six children is the dialee.

Over the past 25 years when my parents have called me, Dad invariably dials the number, just as he orders for my mother in restaurants and is always behind the wheel when they drive. Upon my answering the phone, he never says hello back. "This is your father," he declares, which I, at age 42, still find as heart-stopping as, say, being paged by the principal over the high school PA system. He normally asks one question and maybe a follow-up and that's it. "Here's your mother" is his goodbye. He thrusts the phone at her, although most times Mom doesn't know which of the kids he has called. Dad's an impulse phoner.

My father's lead question has evolved over time. In college, I'd get, "How's your dough?" After graduating, it became "How's work?" And, after I came out and moved to San Francisco in 1985, Dad went through a long phase of "How's your health?"

My reply, always the same: Fine, fine, fine. Long distance came to be an apt description for both the type of call and the quality of our rapport. Mom, the translator between us, would later fill Dad in on the finer details.....