My love of reading comes from my mother. Growing up, we always subscribed to three newspapers and people still tell me that whenever they ran into Mom on the boardwalk, she had a book in her hand. It was from my father though that I learned to be competent.
I think of this often when I am at French school. A common teaching method is to form teams and play games. One game involves being stranded on an island with a list of ten ordinary objects from which players can choose three or four as a means to escape. I have heard more than once from my highly educated teammates that "we are all going to die."
I never felt that way. Dad taught me how to sail a boat and how to dead reckon. I learned carpentry from him and how to fly an airplane. When the transaxle broke on my Fiat 850 Spider, he instructed me on how to install the used one that I picked up from the junkyard. It was the same when the head gasket blew on my 1967 Cutlass S. We had a ping pong table and a metal lathe in the basement that I loved equally. Because of Dad, I would be a good person to be stranded with on that desert island, but not because of my ability to quote poetry and literature.
Dad has been gone a long time now, but I think about him more often and with a renewed sense of gratitude.
Thanks Dad, and Happy Father's Day.