Happy Father's Day

It is Father's Day and this morning I am remembering my own father.

He was young when I was born, only twenty two years old, but he already had his Master's and was working on his Doctorate.

Some of my earliest memories are of him coming up to my room and waking me up to tell me I had a gift to give my mother for Mother's Day. It was a little yellow canary named Caruso, or he would come home for lunch and we would talk about castles and crowns and the Rosetta stone over cheese sandwiches and vegetable beef soup. It was heady stuff.

I remember when he showed me what the number ten looked like. I was amazed at its shape, it wasn't at all what I thought ten was. And I remember when he left me ten dimes and one hundred pennies on the newel post to show me what a dollar was. I was sure you needed it all to make a dollar!

He would shake the covers of my bed out after I had a nightmare to prove there were no spiders in it and he would put me to bed and then wake me up later if there was an important movie on television like Lost Horizon.

He swam out to the sailboat in Minnesota with me under his arm and I had no fears at all. I thought he could do anything.

I was never banned from reading any of his books or magazines and he never minced words when he talked about them. In some ways he was a thoroughly modern man. In others he was very old fashioned. Every single morning he got up and shaved with a straight razor, took a bath and polished his shoes while he sat in the big chair in his bedroom.

I took him to see Camelot. He took me to see The Lion In Winter. The girls in my dorm all had a crush on him and I could understand why. I adored him.

Even when he drove me nuts by forcing me to study for my physics test for hours on end and I said I hated him -- I loved him.

And I miss him.