No one had ever questioned it before last Friday. My dad is "The Bob." Mine. Not yours. Not anyone else's, either. Just the one and only. To have a definite article placed in front of your name, after all, requires a lot of intangibles -- the most important being a smartass wife to bestow it upon you -- and in terms of the Roberts I know, it's not even close.

Robert Strake Parsley is The Bob.


It's how he has been referred to in nearly 1,000 columns since my mother began to write, followed by her extremely good-looking son a few years later. The only reason we haven't patented the name yet is because we didn't think we needed to -- what were the odds that there was someone else out there who may lay claim to the same moniker?

The answer -- as I found out recently in Aosta, Italy -- is "better than you think."


Meet Javier.

Javier is from Barcelona. He is 22, just like me, but he is spending his summer waking up right when the alarm sounds, rather than hitting the snooze. Ever since I arrived back at the Knapps two weeks ago from Eindhoven, Javier has been my surrogate hermano in a family full of surrogate pères, mères, frères et sœurs.

Even though it may make as much sense as a kid named Bayless going by "Billy," Javier is also known as "The Bob."
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"Ooohh, where did you get that keychain?" The yellow piece of foam laying on the table had immediately caught my eye when Javier set it down.


"This? Oh, one time, when my friends and I were in Holland, I was driving, and all of the sudden, the police, he make me get out of the car and do a..." Javier began to blow into an imaginary object, asking for some help from the native English speaker.

"The breathalizer."

"Yes, the breatha-leye-zer," he continued. "But I had not been drinking, not at all, you see, and so I blew 0.00, nothing."

I waited in silence, fascinated to see how this story was going to lead into how Javier became The Bob.

"And because I blew nothing, the police officer, he said to come over to him, and he gave me this." He picked up the keychain before plopping it back down onto the table. "In Holland, apparently, 'The Bob' is the one who stays, and drink the most beer at the bar. 'The Bob' stays until the bar closes," Javier explained in his thick Cataluña accent. "And so the police officer, by giving me a keychain that said 'The Bob,' he was being ironic."

This was the first I had heard of all this. I took a few seconds to reflect, furrowing my brow as I continued to stare straight ahead at my friend on the opposite side of the booth.

"So..... what you're saying is, you are The Bob."

There was no hesitation; just time to form a smile.

"Yes. I am The Bob."


Of course, Javier didn't realize until I explained immediately thereafter the significance of what he had just said. He didn't know he was sitting across the table from the Son of The Bob. But once I filled him in, he refused to defer to his elders.

"We are both The Bob," he said, laughing.

Yeah, we shall see about that, Javier. If you leave your keys alone for just one second, that piece of foam is mine -- and it's getting shipped home to Texas, where it belongs.