“The Best Dad I Could Ask For”
You didn’t think I’d forget about Father’s Day, did you, even though this is posting two days afterward? I learned from last year, neither posting on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, so I vowed this year would be different, and look at that! It already is! For many, many reasons! But at least I have something positive to share; I love my dad, and I’m really glad that he’s in my life. And I want to take some time to thank him the best way that I can; by writing out my feelings on the internet. Just like usual, apparently.
I’ve talked before about how I’m not super great with emotions, good or bad, but I want to try and talk about the good ones today. I’ve been learning a lot this year, from both personal experiences and the stories of others, that I want to tell the people I love that I really do love them. I’m lucky enough to have two loving parents, my dad being one of them, and I want to start really appreciating them more. Because you never know when saying goodbye might be the last time. And that’s a scary thought, and not something that I want to pass by lightly. So, Dad, I love you. And thank you.
I want to thank you for a ton of different things. But the biggest one has been, and always will be, teaching me about nature. I got a lot of my knowledge of birds and wild plants from you, so thank you. When I was younger, I was always amazed by the fact that you could identify birds by their calls, or figure out what kinds of plants were which based on just the shape of their leaves. I wanted to learn that, and you taught me. I’m not the greatest at identifying trees, but what I’ve learned about them I learned from you. Even if it was from racially questionable mnemonics about the shapes of oak leaves, I can still tell apart red oaks from white oaks from bur oaks. And I know the shapes of all the different large birds as they soar above, and I can point them out to my friends whenever I get distracted from a conversation by the numerous turkey vultures circling above. Thank you for teaching me all of that, and more.
Thank you, too, for teaching me to love nature in general in all its forms, not necessarily just the plants and charismatic megafauna. The Fullersburg Halloween Walks are perhaps my most salient examples of this; listening to the stories of trees that eat people after they die because of decomposition, or watching the Bark Beatles perform their greatest hits about breaking down natural detritus, are intertwined with my memories of hiking through those dark woods at night to get to a spooky graveyard where Ozzy Osbourne and Dracula bicker over species of bats. Those Halloween walks were always one of the highlights of the fall, so thank you for being a part of them, and thank you for later helping my brother and I be a part of them. And, of course, thank you for taking us to Fullersburg so we could climb inside a giant bird nest and throw puppets at you.
I’ve got a lot of memories surrounding the forests preserves and you, probably because you, well, work at them. Thank you for taking us to go taste fresh maple syrup, or participating in the seed collection at Take-Your-Kid-To-Work-Day. Thank you for hiking around the preserves with us, to find cool waterfalls and neat rocks. And, in a continuation of that, thank you for taking us to Philmont for my second trip. You were a great adult advisor on that trip, and honestly, having you along grounded me when the rest of the crew got to be a little much. Thank you for that, and thank you for being one of my Cub Scout cubmasters, even if you had no idea what you were getting into when you signed up. Cub Scouts really was such a great time, going to sleep over at the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium with you. Thank you for that.
Huh, I’m starting to sense a theme here; thank you, too, for taking me to Sea Base. It’s still one of the coolest trips I’ve taken in Boy Scouts, and I can’t believe I’ve never talked about it on here before. I mean, we got to live on a sailboat for five days, and over that time, we got to snorkel in like five different reefs, swim with reef sharks, see a tiny octopus, get right next to a sea turtle, spill pancake batter everywhere, accidentally break the captain’s boat, watch The Goonies, go to Fort Lauderdale, and more. That was such an amazing trip for me, and I really think it was as amazing for the other scouts that went along with us. So thank you for taking me on that trip. Thank you for leading it. It was amazing.
Thanks for taking Nick and I to Las Vegas, too, and for taking me to New Orleans a couple months back. I’d go into more detail about those, but I already have, so I’ll save the space. But also thank you for beating those levels of video games that Nick and I could never finish. Actually, we just talked about this on actual father’s day, but I want to thank you again. And thank you for getting me into video games in the first place; Donkey Kong Country, which I remember watching you play on the old SNES and then played for myself on my GameBoy, is still one of my favorite games. And I’m glad that video games are still something we can talk about, too; I love that you’ve played Bloodborne and the Spider-Man game and Far Cry. Several times in the case of Far Cry, but we’ve all got that one game.
I’ve always liked that we can bond over movies, too. Pulp Fiction, Annihilation, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the whole works. I’m not always a huge fan of watching movies, but we’re always able to quote movies back and forth to each other, and that’s an incredible thing, I think. So thank you for that. And I guess musical theater is an extension of that; thank you for taking me to see Jesus Christ Superstar a couple years ago, when it was playing in Aurora with an all-black cast. It was the first, and so far only, time that I’ve seen the show all the way through, live. And since it’s my favorite show, that’s really special to me.
And, in much the same vein, thank you for getting me into so much of the music that I love today. I’d probably never have gotten into Phish or the Talking Heads without you, and those are two of my favorite bands of all time. And, of course, Weird Al. I don’t think that my taste in music or humor would be anywhere it is today without the insanity of Albuquerque, which you introduced to me. Thank you for that. I’m really happy that’s another thing we have together, because that song is just so out there. You, Nick, and I all have that, for sure. Thank you. I love you.
Thank you, also, for always baking bread and cakes and cookies, and smoking meatloaf and ribs in your smoker. Thank you for gardening for so long, and building raised beds and flower boxes and a sand pit and a play hut for Nick and I. Thank you for bringing some extra variety into our home, with the smell of brewing beer (which I personally like), or the scent of rising dough. Tuesdays were always fun for going to the zoo, or for going to a museum, or for going to see Grandpa or Grandma, and then for eating dinner, whether it be mashed potatoes or french fries. Thank you for that.
But thank you, most of all, for being a great father. I talked about before how I’m lucky to have a dad at all, and I want to take that to heart. I talk a lot about white privilege, but the privilege of having a parents is something I should talk about, too. It’s just dumb luck, yes, but thank you for being more than just dumb luck. Thank you for loving Nick and I, and taking care of us in the ways you knew how to. Thank you for always trying to come to every show that we were in, even if that meant seeing a shitty high school production of a shitty rendition of “A Christmas Carol” three days in a row. And thank you for reading my novel, Spectral Crown, all the way through, even though we all joke that you can’t even read. That really meant a lot to me, so thank you.
Thank you, I guess, for being you. For being my dad. Thank you for always being there, for helping me through tough times and always being open to talking about it, even when you didn’t know what to say. Thank you for everything. Like I’ve talked about before, these are just words in a list, and they’re only worth so much as units of speech. But I love you, and I like to think that love can go beyond what words can express, so I hope that, somewhere in this jumble of text, I’ve gotten across the fact that I want to say thank you, and I hope you had a great father’s day. Thank you for being my dad, and thank you for being there for me. You’re a great dad, and a great friend.
I love you.
