I have this image of my father in the small. He is seated in the captain’s chair, his chair, at our kitchen table. His head tilted slightly listening intently to my words. His dark, brown eyes drink in my thoughts weighing their significance. Now, his eyebrows are grayer and more furrowed, yet the intensity of his eyes remains. He has always cherished me and made me feel important. To him, I am somebody. The mere act of listening is not just a simple act to be taken for granted, but a gift.
I have lots of great memories of my dad, but my favorite is probably when he would carry me out to the porch as a little girl and we would wave goodnight to the moon. When the moon was not visible, he would tuck me in and sing Moonlight Bay. I will always associate the moon-round, happy and illuminating-with my pops.
My favorite memory of my Dad is when I was about seven. My Dad was prematurely bald. He had only a few strands of hair he combed across his forehead and hair around the bottom. I love to sit on his lap and put pin curls in the strands on his forehead. One day he forgot to remove the pin curls and went to work. He received a lot of teasing that day but never scolded me. Pat
When I look up the word father in the dictionary, I see my father's name in the meaning. My fahter is a wondrful man, one of the greatest men I know. My Daddy has such a sense of humor, he never lacks for a gret laugh. Now that my mother has passed, I cherish every memory of my Daddy and view all of them as a favorite. When I was a teenager (many many moons ago) my Daddy told me that his greatest wish is for him to be wise and victorious to his children. I have always remember that point in time and those exact words, and I like my Daddy stive to be wise and victorious for my daughter.
Back in the day when men were not allowed to express their emotional side, my father went along. I did see the anger, disapointment, and laughter - but rarely the side that expressed great joy or saddness. Then in 1980 when I was getting ready to graduate from high school, he went with my mother to see an awards ceremony for the school orchestra where I played cello. I did not tell them I was up for any award, they just went to participate. I won the "National School Orchestra Award". I did not appreciate the depth of this award until my father saw me after the ceremony. With tears in his eyes, a huge smile on his face, he hugged me and told me how proud he was of me. He died a short five years later, but this memory lives and helps me remember to tell pass along those words and feelings to my three children even more frequently.
as he gets older, i cherish my dad more and more — including all the memories, because I'm aware he won't be with me forever. I suppose i've come full circle, from adoring daughter to awful adolescent, independant woman, to adoring daughter again. my most cherished memory of my dad will always be his face — especially the expression he had when he cut through the live christmas lights with sissors when they were still plugged in. Oh…and the time his suit pants ripped all the way up the backside. I'd fallen over while trying to run away from school and he'd bent over to pick me up off the gravel drive. It was my second ever day at school so I can only have been 5 , but that memory has always stayed with me.
I'm unable to say just one memory of my Daddy is a fav because there are far more than one. Like Monique, there is a funny one that stands out. I was 15 and cooking Sunday dinner for the first time. I made oven-fried chicken, southern-style potato salad, green beens and corn bread from scratch. I really out did myself to everyone's surprise. I was given an applause and daddy was the last one to sing his praises. He grabbed my hands and said to me: "Baby, that was the best mashed potato salad I've ever had!" We laughed and he hugged me. I had over-cooked the potatoes and they just mashed up as I stirred all the other ingredients into them to make them potato salad. They were yummy as was the dinner!
Mre in... TENNESSEE!!! And then he would break out into some victory song. My sister and I would just get spun into a frenzy with excitement. We would bring our cat Violet on the road trip sometimes... she never liked this, or any portion, of the journey down to Tennessee.
It's not necessarily the most cherished, but one of the funniest... one weekend we spent the entire day making dad's famous spaghetti sauce... the kind that takes a very long time to simmer and it smells so good but you can't eat it for hours and hours. Then, finally, the time came to boil the noodles. Our mouths were salivating, for in mere minutes, we'd be eating that delicious sauce. The moment arrived: time to remove the noodles from the boiling water. Dad, eager to get to the meal, skipped the step of placing the colander in the sink, and poured out the water using the pot lid to keep the noodles from pouring out. Well, the lid slipped, and so did all the noodles. Down the drain. In the next 30 seconds, Dad desperately tried to catch all the noodles before they slipped down the drain screaming in pain and frustration as we watched them all slither away. We laughed and cried at the same time. The next 1/2 hour of boiling water & cooking noodles was the longest 1/2 hour of my life.
My most favorite recent memory was the weekend I fell in love with my dad. Since we grew up in different households and I spent only every other weekend with him growing up, as an adult we had a lot of catching up to do on one-on-one visits. So some years ago, I invited him to come on a solo trip to see me here in San Francisco. I rented him a little BMW race car convertible, we drove to Pebble Beach for lunch and then he whizzed us up and down the San Francisco hills. The final event was when I took him to see Pancho Sanchez, his favorite Latin congo player. When my dad tore up the dance floor in the front row doing his doggie fire hydrant leg lift dance move, a woman turned to me and said, "Is that your father?" (meaning, is he really gettin' down like that?) And I smiled, all proud like I was the parent and said, "Yup. Isn't it great?"
