Parties make the world go round!: Happy Father's Day

So it's another Father's Day without Daddy to celebrate with. I know that's nothing new, but Father's Day, like Mother's Day, always kind of creeps up on me and then, there it is. It reminds me of past Father's Days, although to be truthful, after all these years, it gets harder and harder to remember the details.

I always say that Daddy was the best father ever and I still believe that. He did so many of the right things, many of which I have chronicled in previous posts. He was the cool parent of our parents. He was the one that seemed to move with the times and treated us more like adults as we became adults than Mother did. He was there for us at the important times of our lives and he supported us fully. I think it hurt him as much as it did us when we experienced pain and disappointment. He truly knew us as people and celebrated that with us.

That's not to say that sometimes he didn't act uncool. I remember once when one of my brothers left his stuff on the stairs at the house. It probably wasn't much and, to be fair, it wouldn't have been all that hard for whichever brother to have just picked it up on the way upstairs. But it didn't happen and Daddy kept mentioning it and he finally got mad about it. And so then he picked up the stuff, opened the front door, and threw it out on the grass. As petulant and childish and embarrassing as it was, I found it hard not to laugh. Especially since it wasn't my stuff out there. So there was some yelling between my dad and whichever brother it was and then that brother huffed and puffed and went out and got his stuff and took it upstairs. And pouted about it, as did Daddy, for a while.

When I was out of college, I made a spur of the moment decision to buy a new car. I had only bought 2 cars in my life up to the point and, as was typical, Daddy was there with me to help guide me and educate me and, most of all, help me not get ripped off (he was the forerunner to Clark Howard!). But this time I did it on my own and, what made it worse, I bought a foreign car, a Toyota Celica. We won't even get into the fact that I bought a standard transmission car, which I'd never driven before in my life. It was a car I bought on my own, without Daddy's helpful guidance, and a foreign car to boot. I drove it home and was pretty mortified that Daddy pitched a major fit out in front of the house, then stomped up the steps into the house, and wouldn't speak to me for the rest of the weekend. Mother told me later that he was just really disappointed that I had done it without him and he was afraid I had paid too much. Right....

But for the most part, Daddy always behaved in a way that didn't embarrass us and that let us know he was proud of us. So today, as always, I wish Daddy a Happy Father's Day in heaven. I love you, Daddy, and I miss you every day!