Happy 80th, Dad!

Dad would have been 80 years old today. Posting thoughts about Dad is always tough for me, not because I can’t think of any good stories but because I have too many. It’s not the writing that’s hard, it’s the editing.

We had the same problem when Scott, Amy, and I were working on his eulogy. We spent most of our time debating which stories to leave out. We had to leave out a lot of good stories because we only had one hour to fill. We easily could have made that funeral a Jerry Lewis telethon type of two-day event just entertaining people with stories about our Dad.

There was one story that I left out of the service, and I’ve always regretted it, not because it’s better than the stories that we did tell. It’s because when I look back, there are few stories that could encapsulate his character in just a few paragraphs.

Our church used to have an annual clean-up day. The church members would spend an entire Saturday every spring cleaning, painting, and landscaping. Of course, my dad always signed up to help. He usually signed up for the activity that nobody else wanted to do. You just haven’t lived until you’ve seen a 300-pound man climb a tall oak tree with a chainsaw in his hand trimming trees. One of my friends was astonished at Dad’s monkey-like agility and ability to navigate tree branches 30 feet above the ground.

But one year, Dad was out of town on a business trip that week. He made sure to catch a flight on Friday night to be back in time. Because of a series of flight cancellations and delays, he had to spend the night in an airport and didn’t make it home until Saturday morning. I picked Dad up at the airport at 6:30 that Saturday morning. The first thing he said when he got in the car was, “Take me straight to the church.”

I said, “Dad, you stayed up all night at an airport. Everyone will understand if you don’t come.”

He said, “That doesn’t matter. I said I’m going to be there, so I’m going to be there.”

That was my Dad. If he said he was going to do something, he always did it.