Anyone who knows my dad knows that he is one of the most unique individuals with an extraordinarily creative sense of humor, philosophical, and entirely true to himself – he is completely “against the grain” in every way. I’ve always respected his ability to not buy into or follow what other people do, how they act, or how they live their lives, just because it’s expected or popular. I’ve met no one even remotely like him. He always pushed me to exercise, play chess, ride motorcycles and always wanted to “toughen me up”. He also made me study hours of vocabulary and would test me on them later.
Just today he said: “It would have been perfect–you could have been a Marine Corps pilot who played flute in a symphony and raced motocross on weekends and a grand chess master—-all the things I could never have been on my best day. You were my last chance and I scared you when i bought you a yz 80 racer and ruined it all—-oh what the fuck, there is always the next life, and you turned out pretty well considering your parents were dysfunctional.”
Here are some photos I have with he and I from back in the day —
- Playing lots of video games with popsicles and also feeding my plastic dinosaurs with plants and casino games in the olympic kingsway casinos.
- Him wanting me to play chess so I had a chess program on my computer that I’d play against
- Dinners with my dad were always fun and entertaining
- The penny game where he would leave 3 pennies somewhere around my room and I’d do the same
- Endless piano and flute recitals & competitions
- Pulling weeds for hours at the farm
- Him wanting me to read “The Bottle Imp” and me trying to get through it for days
- Motorcycling in the desert. Or biking, when there was large orange bugs flying everywhere around us
- Going to 9 mile canyon and somewhere close to it, or in it, were “pin bugs” that I was very afraid of
- My dad threatening to take me down to the “pool people” when we went swimming at grandma and grandpa’s house
- Spending hours memorizing vocabulary lists for tests later
- Motorcycling at Emerson Elementary school
- Him telling me I was innocent and that he wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing
- Doing exercises at Emerson Elementary school, including the monkey bars that ripped my skin off both of my palms once due to blisters popping
- Hopping on one foot as part of exercises, and he’d always say “no flapping” if I flapped my arms while I was doing it
- Our trip to Oregon where I fell in love with the Seagulls and didn’t want to leave them and my dad said to me “You see something in them that others don’t see.” Sometime shortly after that I wrote in a notebook I had “I love seagulls. You don’t know how I feel about them.”
- Occasional camping trips we’d take, I remember a few specifically to the Wasatch mountains
- “Family Fun” weekends
Below are photos I gathered up from different periods of time as memories:
