You're Just Like Your Dad

For some people, being told they are just like their father is the ultimate insult. Not all fathers are good men after all. Take my grandfather for instance. He was a World War II vet, a Canadian rifleman to be exact. Maybe it was the torture he suffered at the hands of the Japanese (to the day he died he could tell you down to the hour and minute how long he was a P.O.W.), or maybe he was just a gypsy soul. Either way, after the war he just couldn't settle down. He dated my dad's mom. He even proposed to her and planned a wedding, but when he found out she was pregnant, he was gone faster than Willie Mays stealing second base. Did that make him a bad man? Maybe, maybe not. My dad never got to find out. He didn't meet his father until he was in his thirties when a long-lost cousin tracked him down and asked him if he was interested in meeting his father. I don't know if they ever reconciled. I was too young to know, and my dad has always been very private about his innermost feelings and conflicts. What I do know for certain is that if anyone had ever told my dad that he was just like his father, it would have been deeply hurtful.

Fortunately for me, my dad was nothing like his father. Though he was gone to work before I got up for school and only came home in time for dinner every evening, he was always present in my life. We may not have had time during the week to do much together, but the weekends? The weekends were our time. We played board games, and we fished when we could, though it was never as often as I would have liked. Seriously, I would have spent all day, every day out on the water if it were up to me. We watched scary movies together. Not the ridiculous splatter films like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street (we both thought those kinds of films were absurd), no, for us, it was all about the classics. Dracula and Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and The Mummy. That was real horror and we loved it.

I wish I had more pictures of my dad from when I was a kid. I have precious few and none of them are digital. I suppose I could take them somewhere and have them scanned into a digital format, but there's just something so nostalgic about turning the pages of an old school photo album, pages yellowed by the years, and reminiscing about the best of times.

My favorite picture of my dad, however, isn't one that I can show to anyone apart using whatever words I can find to describe it. It lives in my mind, you see. I'm ten years old and it's just Dad and me in the little aluminum fishing boat that we had so many good days on. The sun is on his face as we motor across the lake making his blue eyes shimmer not unlike the water below us. He is wearing his signature straw fishing hat and he has a length of fishing line pinned between his teeth in a slight grin. He is focused on the lake ahead of him as he guides us to our secret fishing hole. He doesn't know that I'm looking at him with wonder in my eyes and hoping that someday I can be just like him. It's something I still want today.

Looking back, I don't remember if we caught anything that day. If it were anything like most days that we went fishing, we probably didn't catch anything worth keeping, but it didn't matter. The important thing was that we were together. I was spending time with the most important person in my life, doing something we both loved to do. Those moments were precious and few and I will treasure them dearly.

Some people resent being told they are just like their dad. You could not pay me a greater compliment. I'm forty years old now and I have three sons of my own. I hope that someday they will look back at me the way I look at my dad. I hope someday they will say of me, "I want to be just like my dad".