52 Blessings Project, #23

Fathers.

my dad and me in 1999

Father's Day has come and gone in somewhat of a blur. I didn't even get to see my father, but he was on my mind and I stirred up some memories of him from my childhood....

standing in his studio watching him paint. sometimes he'd even let me practice mixing some colors on my own pallette. my sister and i coined rutabaga as our all-time favorite color (probably not so much for the color as for the name). i was always in awe of how his brush strokes came together with such lifelike results.

walking out in the garage on a warm summer night with clean bare feet, after just having a bath, to watch him work on a car. trying so hard to understand the workings of a combustion engine as he explained it to me. feeling important if i was asked to hand him a tool (and even more important if i knew what it was and handed him the right tool - such as a ratchet).

snuggling up on a sunday afternoon to watch/listen to the indy 500. he had a way of making it interesting by talking about the drivers and the cars. i still love the sound of a car race, it always reminds me of my dad.

lying in bed at night and feeling the thump of his music in the studio below me. my earliest memories of music are from my dad. back in the seventies he had stacks of albums like simon & garfunkle, the beatles, jim croce, lynyrd skynyrd, harry nielsen, the bee gees.... he listened to music while he worked and i loved blasting it from the huge console stereo in the living room on saturday mornings.

giggling at his funny antics, especially at the dinner table (much to my mom's dismay as she tried to maintain a sense of manners about the table). he would create, eat or do anything with food for a laugh. we once stuck a banana in his taco and he ate it as we lost ourselves in laughter. i would watch in horror as he would shake up a huge scoop of cayenne pepper in a container of water and then drink it. even at restaurants he would make characters out of the skin of a kiwi or the shell of a lobster and then let us bring them home (sometimes allowing them to ride on the hood of the car).

family portrait where the kids can be seen in the mirror behind my shoulder and in my sunglasses.

I suspect when our kids get older their memories of their dad might include things like watching basketball games, working on cars and doing other mechanical projects, sharing candies that only they can appreciate (chocolate covered gummi bears?), learning to wakeboard and water ski....