Answer: A pretty lame father, that’s what sort.

So, yes, it was my bright idea the other weekend to rent the greatest pop culture reference-laden movie of the past forty years and watch it with my two middle school-aged sons. To me, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect since we were heading on vacation to the beach the following week. The movie I rented for us to watch, which you might have already guessed, was Jaws.

I’m sure I don’t need to explain the plot of Jaws to you, since, as I pointed out, it was such a popular movie. But there could be a few young adults out there who didn’t have a cool parent such as myself to introduce these things to them. In that case, maybe I should give a brief summary.

Jaws is the story of a giant fish, known as a great white shark, that one summer decides to swim around a Martha’s Vineyard-type resort island chomping its way through the local tourists. This is, as you might imagine, upsetting to the powder-blue-leisure-suit wearing town leaders because even back in the 1970s having tourists eaten by a giant fish unfairly gave an area a “black eye.” The exciting conclusion comes when Roy Scheider, who plays police chief Martin Brody, is locked in a riveting duel to the death with the shark until he (Scheider, not the shark) promises the Jaws producers that he’ll do the sequel, Jaws 2, if the producers would untie his character’s feet and hands from the sinking boat.

Some parents might be wondering if perhaps Jaws is too intense a movie even for middle school-aged children. My wife, Beth, being one of those parents. But as I told Beth and my sons, Kevin and Chris, I was about their age when the movie first came out and I watched it in the theater on the big screen, and afterward I was not afraid to go into the water.

They pointed out, however, that I was living in Phoenix at the time and the only way a shark could attack a swimmer there would be if one accidentally fell out of an airplane and landed into someone’s backyard pool first. The biggest threat we had in the water was getting bloodshot eyes from too much chlorine.

Although we didn’t have an ocean, there was a water park in nearby Scottsdale with a large wave pool that simulated the ocean, if the ocean were a wave pool the size of grocery store parking lot. I’m not an engineer so I don’t have any idea how true this is, but everyone used to say that the wave pool worked on the same principal as a standard toilet. We would paddle out on our rubber rafts as close to the “toilet tank” wall as we could get then await the giant flush, which created a tsunami force wave that would wash all the rafters back onto the beach. There were so many people and rafts that by the time we reached the sand we were stacked four high. Even if a shark had been in the wave pool, I seriously doubt anyone would have noticed.

But after watching the movie - despite some cringing, turning of the head, and peeking through fingers held over the eyes (mostly by me) - everyone said they were fine and wouldn’t be afraid of going swimming in the ocean during our vacation.

That was until I read a news article online a few days later about a shark that allegedly attacked a seal (belonging to a rival gang) a mere 50 feet off the shore of Cape Cod. One witness to the gruesome attack offered this chilling observation: “I could have been the seal.”

The first thing I thought was, “Great, now we are going to spend our entire beach vacation sitting in the beach parking lot where, for the record, there have been few reported shark attacks in recent years.”

But this experience provided my sons a basic life lesson that they will not soon forget. The sort of life lesson you can’t learn in school. The lesson is this: Someday, when it comes time to pick a pop culture reference-laden movie to watch with your own children just before going on a summer vacation to the beach, pick one of the “Rocky” movies instead.

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