Happy Father's Day

Today is Father’s day. I have to say I have a great father. He is funny and interesting as you have witnessed in my Trooper Bob series of stories. He is also pretty pragmatic. I can remember coming home all in a snit and him listening to my drama of the day. He would look at me with his piercing blue eyes, his mouth would curl up into a smile and he would say “Baby girl, what difference does it make? Just let it go.”

He was and still is very obvious. The fact of the matter is sometimes he is Captain Obvious. Take for instance the day that Matilda wanted to drive the tractor. Now I want you to picture an ancient big behemoth of a metal machine. Did you ever watch Green Acres? Do you remember the tractor that Eddie Albert had that would fart and pop and billow blue smoke? That was our tractor. I don’t know from where it came, I just remember it being down by the garden. We, as children, were enthralled with big machinery. This of course was our holy grail. We would crawl all over it, pretend we were plowing the north forty or harvesting the grain.

One day Trooper Bob offered for Matilda to drive the tractor for real. She was so excited she hopped up on the step and promptly grabbed the stack. That would be the exhaust stack, the hot exhaust stack. Matilda let out a blood curdling scream as she yanked her hand off the flesh cooking piece of metal. Captain Obvious ran over to Matilda and said “don’t touch that it’s hot”! Thank you Captain, she would not have known that if you hadn’t told her. Then to pour salt on then would he say “man you moved fast. It didn’t take you long to look at that.”

He in addition to being pragmatic and Captain Obvious was also a teacher. Oh yes he taught us so many things. I am able to scale a fish, bait a hook, pop the head off a game bird and cook a mean venison chili because of him. He taught me to drive a vehicle with a manual transmission and how to do a 360 using my parking brake and the accelerator. This is very useful if you find yourself in a chase and need to turn around and confuse your pursuer. He taught me how to hammer a nail without choking up on my hammer and hitting my thumb. He taught me how to screw down a tin roof and how to start a fire. He taught me how to change my own oil in my car although I avoid this at all costs. I am not the most graceful person in the world so you can just imagine what I look like after I have pulled the plug on the oil pan accidently bumping the container out of the way and ending up with it up my nose and down my throat. My daddy of course would be Captain Obvious in this situation and tell me “keep the container UNDER the oil pan cause that oil taste like shit.” How he knows what shit tastes like is another story.

So as spawn of Captain Obvious I would just like to state the obvious, I love my daddy. So here is my message to my daddy:
An unmistakable trait of every true genius is their persistent awareness of how much more there is to know. And an unmistakable trait of every true sage is their persistent awareness of how much more there is to love.
Loving you more today than yesterday, Thank you for being my daddy.