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| My dad and mom |
He once decided that we, as a family, needed to see how it felt to drive all the way around America. It took us three years.
And although freeways were a mainstay of American culture by the 70′s, my father disliked them a lot. We drove all over the country on two lane roads, stopping at museums, exhibits of large driftwood, forty foot tall sculptures of Paul Bunyan. I’ve seen memorials to pancakes, the worlds largest antler sculpture, Harlem, and street lights shaped like Hershey's kisses.
Any child in their right mind goes through their life with the assumption that everyone else on earth is just like they are, so I never once wondered if my dad was the slightest bit — well — unique. I assumed children all across America were driving to ice skating shows and forging through the wilderness to cut down their own Christmas tree.
Only as an adult did I realize how lucky I really had been.
As a seventeen year old, going on a date for the first time, I wasn’t so pleased to have a father who greeted my date sitting at the kitchen table in his one-piecers and cleaning his gun. He laughed for three weeks at the terrorized look he got out of my date.
In college, just as I was realizing my childhood had indeed been rich and spontaneous rather than traumatic and strange, I heard stories of my father skimming the ground in his ultralight airplane that he had built himself in the garage, trying to hike to the top of Timpanagos just for kicks, writing brilliant and complex letters to his posterity, filling his garage with hundreds of shelves so he could store all of his food storage.
Now as I contemplate my life with my own children, I see it more clearly.
My dad rocks.
Happy Father’s Day, dad.
Tell me about your dad. Funny? Serious? Spontaneous? Crafty? Loud? Powerful? How has your dad shaped your life?
