Father's Day

It's Father's Day, so it's time for me to tell my father how awesome he is and how lucky I am to have him as my dad.

Once, at the condo where Dad's parents live, we were out behind the house at the big pond that was the water feature the condo-owners all paid tons of money to look at out their back windows. Fish lived inside the pond, so I had taken my little cousins outside (they were visiting from Colorado), so we could all look at the fishes.

The fish ate the bread we brought, then my aunt came outside with my dad and my grandparents, and one thing led to another, and Dad picked me up and threw me into the pond with all the fish. The fish then swam all around me and nibbled at my arms and legs and it became evident to me that, given the sheer number of fish in the pond, I was sitting in a soup made of their poos, rather than water.

Worse, because the whole family was going out to eat (which was why Aunt Susie, Dad, Grandpa and Grandma all came outside in the first place--to tell us it was time to leave), Dad chucking me in the water forced everyone to wait for their food while I took a shower to remove the mud (fish poo), then because we were an hour and a half from home, I had to wear my grandmother's clothing to dinner out. And since I was maybe 12, I was mortified.

I even had to borrow shoes.

And when I was little, when Dad woke me up in the morning, he used cubes of ice. Or he grabbed the headboard and footboard of my bed and shook the bed violently, screaming "EARTHQUAKE" at the top of his lungs. This occurred often enough that when we had an actual earthquake, I woke up just enough to say, "Don't be a jerk," and then went back to sleep.

Because Dad used to slam his face against my window-screen every time he went for a walk in order to terrify me, the sound of someone breaking into my home through a window to rob and murder me will never frighten me or wake me up if I am sleeping. So that's convenient.

I bet other people's dads don't give them all these great stories they can tell on their blogs. I bet other people had boring dads who made them eat their peas and never toppled their chair over at the dinner table because they were leaning back on two legs. My dad is awesome. And I am lucky to have him.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.