Father's Day is Sunday
My pappy, as I've never called him, is a rather smart man. I read something today that said at about age 6 you realize your dad doesn't know everything. I think it took me until at least 13, and sometimes I still forget. At 13 I was in my dad's science class, he being a teacher at the middle school and me being a student. It wasn't his class that made me question his wealth of knowledge. It was Algebra. He could do Algebra, certainly. Every so often though it took him some time to figure it out. Ten years of school and this was the first time my father had paused to figure something out. That's smart. He could probably kick your tail at Scattergories.

Dad is an athlete too. He might tell you that he wasn't. He sat the bench in high school football. He wrestled, or played table tennis, or racket ball, or whatever else they needed another man for to score another point for his fraternity. There were no letters, no accolades, no trophies to show off. Like the tortoise and the hare fable, the longer the race went on, the closer he moved to the front. The star athletes developed their beer bellies and love handles and soon just stopped playing. Their exercise was swinging a club and riding a cart. His was riding a bike. Everyday. To and from work. And so his average basketball skills suddenly seemed top notch, especially since few other dad's even found their way outside. And still he rides into retirement, still able to hop off and get in a basketball game, or go for a run, or most anything else. His game hasn't fallen off much as far as I can tell, but everyone else around him has.

Dad is part nomad. He likes to go. Camping is the cheap way to spend the night on your way somewhere. My uncle tried to explain that he and my dad had differing opinions on camping. For Dad, it's a means to an end. For my uncle, it's an end. I told my uncle that I understood, but that my dad's opinions had a funny way of becoming my opinions. And they have. My approach to sports, to camping, to religion, and probably to life are pretty similar. We have a few differences, but they seem to get fuzzier the farther along we get in this little journey.

Dad is clever. It's a kind of a bad pun, silly poetry sort of clever. The kind that's sometimes too clever for it's own good. That may seem familiar to you.

Dad can teach. There's a reason we share so many opinions. He's been teaching me since before I knew it. He did it with style. Some of the kids fondly called him "Crazy A". He liked his experiements, and his accents. I remember a Swedish Cross Country skier teaching us about force. And I'm pretty sure the lesson on hypothesis was set to the tune of "Things that make you go Hmmm." Thank you C&C music factory. I was bound to pick up a few things along the way.

Was dancing one of them? Dad can dance. This is a more recent development. Last weekend as I'd ask a young woman to dance, I'd have to point to my father and say, "I can't dance like that, you know?" The young ladies didn't seem to mind.

Maybe it's because I've started to look like him too.