Father's Day

My dad died in 2001. (He always said he wanted to live long enough to see that year, as the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey intrigued him.

Well, anyway, since I can't visit my dad in person, I thought I would offer a small tribute to the man who, to a large degree, made me who I am.

My dad was a brilliant man, an engineer who had thirty-something patents in his name. He was a key player in the early years of Texas Instruments. But he also had a goofy sense of humor. Some of his favorite TV shows were Gomer Pyle, Hogan's Heroes, McHale's Navy and the Beverly Hillbillies. He also liked Popeye cartoons.

My dad loved animals of any kind. When I was little he and I were always conniving ways to get my mother to agree to more pets. When my parents retired to a lake house, he learned to fish but had a terrible time cleaning fish--he hated to kill them and probably would have made pets out of them if not for my mother's objections.

He taught me how to fly a kite, ride a bicycle, drive a car and change a flat tire. He taught me how to paint a fence and how to hammer a nail straight.

I like to think I inherited my father's sense of adventure. When he was a young man, he lived in a Venezuelan jungle for a year, testing out the portable gravity meter he helped to invent. He loved to travel, and when I was a little girl he took six of his seven children and my mom to Europe for three months. We traveled all over in a Volkswagen bus.

My dad had quite a temper but he never raised a hand to any of his children or to my mom. He sent us to good schools and he took lots of home movies to document our childhoods. He never openly criticized the boyfriends my sisters and I brought home, though some of them were pretty scary. He loved my mom's cooking and would do just about anything for hot peach cobbler with ice cream. He also loved to cook hamburgers on the grill every Saturday night. He loved old movies. He bought a VCR back when they cost about $800, and he recorded hundreds of old movies off the TV and meticulously labeled them, with an index and everything.

He was extremely neat (and I most certainly did NOT inherit that tendency, I'm afraid to say!). My mom says that if he got up to go to the bathroom during the night, he combed his hair before he came back to bed. He read about one book per day and kept a record of every book he read.

I love you, Daddy, wherever you are.

Kara