In Remebrance of Dad

Today is Father's Day in the United States. It's always a bit of a bittersweet day for me. My dad died about 11 years ago, and he always was a bit of an enigma.

I don't really remember this myself, but the family stories tended to be along the lines of me following my dad around like a puppy when I was young. He was a scientist, and an inventor. I do kind of remember "helping" him with his experiment to pull clean water from the air. I'm not sure he ever got it to do exactly what he wanted it to, but that's the kind of stuff he worked on.

Dad was a mathematical physicist and worked most of his employment life with NASA on the Apollo and Skylab programs. He retired about the time the shuttle program got going, partly because NASA was giving incentives for employees to retire early and partly because he disagreed with the direction NASA was taking. I never knew it at the time, but Dad had several patents to his name, government stuff but still in his name.

Dad was a nuts and bolts kind of guy. If he couldn't see it, feel it, hear it, taste it, smell it, then it probably didn't exist. Feelings were never an option around Dad. I recall being quite mortified the day Dad marched out onto the field to claim me from drill team rehearsal because we had gone over the alloted time. He even went up the food chain to the school board, so the teacher saw him coming and called me off the field. Devasting when you're a bit of a dorky teenager, just barely at the fringes of being part of the cool crowd. Didn't matter. It was time to go, so we went.

Yet there came the day when my marriage collapsed into a puddle, and I called home, and the first words out of Dad's mouth were, "We're on our way. What do you need us to do?"

Dad didn't really go in for saying "I love you", or much of anything along those lines. It took me years to realize that he did "I love you", rather than saying it. If there was something that needed fixing, and Dad was around, it got fixed. And there was no escaping the regular weekly call to find out how the week had gone.

The man could be absolutely infuriating about some things, had a dry sense of humor that you had to watch out for, and was far from perfect even though he did the best he could, but I miss him.

Happy Father's Day, Dad!