Daddy

I love my daddy. I don't talk about him often enough in this space. He's a stubborn, hard-headed, soft-hearted, penguin-walking, mathematical/engineering whiz with a love of ramblin wrecks, sweet and sour pickles, WWII history, and trains. He gave us his time, money, support and love... and still does.

He has sold cokes and cooked hot dogs at the football concession stand to support his band geek children. Travelled to football games near and far to cheer on the son whose first punt went farther up than out, but who developed into a great tackler and could get the fool out of the football by the end of the season. He has used his trusty pocket knife to relieve feet of splinters and entertained us by proving that someone with a lot of muscle mass cannot float and will instead sink to the bottom of the pool. He not-so-patiently taught us how to drive both a manual and an automatic car, even though it is probably responsible for the lack of hair on his head and the gray in the few that remain. You can still find him taxi-ing grandchildren around and his spaghetti is spicy deliciousness.

"Sit" and "still" are not in his vocabulary.The last movie he sat through was The Fugitive in 1993 and he loves my mother so much he took her to see Gone With the Wind (all four hours of it) when they were dating. If you need him, he's probably in the shop making something or repairing something or hanging out with the dog.

He taught us THE best fight song EVER:



Doctor is a concept that ranks right up there with educated idiots and liverwurst for my Dad. So it wasn't a terrible shock to any of us that the way we found out he'd been having chest pains for a while, was when he experienced dizziness and left-arm pain at the hardware store and ended up in the ICU hooked up to a cardiac monitor for a couple of days. He has an appointment with the cardiologist next Friday and needs to watch his sugar intake and was prescribed something for cholesterol. We're grateful we get to love him a lot longer and that we can still ask him for advice and opinions for many years to come.