My father and I didn't always get along. Looking back, I believe he wanted a son who loved hunting, fishing, and athletics. What he got was a bookish kid whose interests more closely resembled those of his elder brother. A gene pool contains variety and then there's Murphy, working overtime again.
What I remember, looking back down the tunnel of years, is all the things he taught me. Examples: how to build a fire, swing an axe, saw a relatively straight line, aim a pistol or rifle and hit something with it, drive a car, bait a hook. How not to be, or act, low-class. That women are nice, but they're often too hot or too cold, and that's normal for them.
We shared a love of words. A cherished childhood memory is of my father getting an abstracted expression, walking over and picking up the dictionary to look up a word, maybe the definition, maybe the derivation. I find myself doing it too, mostly online these days. More often than you'd think, when writing in this blog, I'll check an unusual word for spelling or usage.
Things father never managed to teach me, although he tried, would include standing up straight (I slouch), catching a ball tossed to me (that coordination didn't come until my late 20s), or leading a flying bird with a shotgun (a knack I never got, though I understand the physics).
We ended up on different teams, politically, he a lifelong Democrat and I mostly a Republican. What I figured out long after he passed was that we were more alike than dissimilar. He was a Southern Democrat and, during the Reagan presidency, most of those became Republicans. He didn't live long enough for that to happen, he was not young when I was born.
I hope you had a father who could share things with you, and that those memories are good ones. Far too many in these latter days do not. To Dads everywhere, Happy Father's Day. And to my Dad, thanks.
