Father's Day

Hi Dad.

I want to tell you about my Dad.  I have been wanting to write this post for some time now, it should be easy but something is telling me it might be harder than I first thought.  Not because there's nothing to say but because where do I start!

  

First I want to say, I know he loves us.  He selflessly gives his time and money, in ways that when it was my turn as an adult I wouldn't do.

  

Second, he is amazingly good at everything he puts his hands to.  I remember as a girl seeing his projects.  He loves to restore things, cars, tractors, airplanes.

    

He is a successful business man and a private pilot.  We flew to our grand-parent's houses in the summer and I will never forget being at his parents house, mam ma and pap-pa's, and being "weathered in."  The "back to school" dance was just a few days away and I thought we would never get home.  I would go outside and look up at the sky and if I saw a hole in the clouds I would go get him and show it to him.  If I where the parent and my child kept dragging me outside and showing me some useless hole in the clouds, I probably would have put a stop to that child doing that.  Well, lets just be honest here, I would have yelled at said child.  Did he?  No, he did not!  He didn't.  He always kept his cool, I never saw him yell at us.  

Now, if we were in trouble and there was a spanking to get, he gave it.  Know what I mean.  Oh no . . .  you did not want the dad to give the spanking!  Ouch that memory still burns my butt.

Anyway back to his kindness, we (my kids and I) developed what we called "the Fofo Technique,"  it goes like this, be kind to the people you want to not be so kind to.  Be nice to the ones who you are mad at because of whatever they did to hurt you.  Did we do that all the time, no, but if you ever asked him for advice of how to handle a given situation, his advice was always to treat them with kindness.  So we began just referring to that as the Fofo Technique and really didn't have to call him for advice in that area of our lives anymore we would just look at each other and say, "give them the Fofo Technique" and we would be done with it.

Third he is a story teller.  Sometimes he makes me laugh so hard that I can't stand it.  My sides are hurting so bad that I can't breathe but I would never stop him.  Make me laugh some more, daddy.  That's what I say.

Also, I really want to share a story with you of what he did when I turned 40 yrs old.

I should title this; "My 40th Birthday"

I lived in this cute little house in Brenham Texas, (side note; one of the cutest little towns in Texas), so when I moved to the western side of the state, I was in a position to leave the house furnished while it was on the market to be sold.  Mom and dad would come over to keep a check on things for me.  Dad, being the investigative person the he is, went outside and checked things in the backyard. 

 

Okay, let me just say right here that I have a reputation; my step son Chad refers to my cooking as "blackened."  Well, I'm a busy girl, I always have more than one thing going at any given time, so cooking just has to fit somewhere in the middle of all that.  Or it use to, cause I got tired of burning everything I cook, so now I get a chair and sit there with it.  Seriously, a challenge to my hyper active side, but what are you gonna do?  Anyway. . . that was a long way round to get back to where the story is. . . so one day, I was cooking red beans on the stove top and well...I let the water run dry in there, real dry.  So bad that I abandoned that pot.  I just walk that smoking thing right out in the back yard and round the corner and set her down.  At the time it was to get the smoking stinky thing out of the house and let it cool off.  Later it became nothing to me.  I just forgot about it.

  

So, back to the 4oth birthday, he finds that pot with some of the burned beans still in there and brings it in my house and sets it on the stove and put one my kitchen pretties beside it so I could deny that it was my pot of beans and took a picture.  Then he took his pride and joy pictures to be developed and enlarged and had a card made for me.  It said, "Is Dinner Ready Yet?"  And inside he wished me a happy birthday and I don't remember the rest of what may have been said inside that card.  But I will never forget the front of it. 

 

So, today in honor of my Dad and my children's grand dad, this story is for you and this picture shows that some things just never change. 

I love you, you make me laugh.