Father's Day loot haul

As the day closes I consider myself luckier than most. I got a watch and that's nice. I also got a stainless cook set for doing beer chicken with vegetables. That will get a lot of use. It might even cause be to buy beer on occasion.

But the best gift I got this year was from my step daughter. She called to wish me happy fathers day and confirm she is her mother's daughter. The card is in the mail.

You need to consider that her father was a tall thin quiet man and then after he passed away her mother married me. I'm not tall. I'm not thin. And the last thing you would say about me is that I'm quiet. In fact I describe myself this way, "some people can walk into a room and no one will notice. I'm not one of those people." That's a lot for a young lady to get over when she was her daddy's girl.

Almost as good was the one from our adopted son. He came by with a table and extra chairs because we needed them even though he couldn't be here for the dinner. He's a dad and his daughters have plans for their dad.

I could tell he wanted to talk as soon as he arrived. So we went out on the deck and had a conversation. Probably the greatest gift one father can give to another is advice on raising kids. The next best gift a father can give to another is thanks when that advice works.

Today's a good day. I now have that watch I've needed when I can't find the other two I have. It looks like I've got the tools to do chicken with vegetables without soy sauce, a good thing, real good thing.

But most of all it was a keeper kind of day. I'm sure in the near future something will happen that causes me to pause with the kids. I'll reach back for today and hold it close to help me get through whatever it is. That's why I think of it as a keeper kind of day. It keeps us keeping on when things get tough.

June 15 is Father's day in America? Very nice tradition. In some sense it was Father's day for me too, because it was my father's 60th birthday yesterday. We live in the same town but i don't even know his adress or phone number, even if i got it can't imagine conversation, according to some distant rumours he is alone. Should i ask him how he was doing for the last 20 years? That seems unpolite and rather silly. If he would say he was drinking, should i reply, that's fine, drink on, or maybe recommend to take care of health? All i can invent seems either stupid or embarrassing. Who am i to bother person who is comfortable alone.

Yes, John E. Like the way English flourishes by swiping handy words and concepts from other languages, while leaving behind their cumbersome grammatical structures. I can git me a Weltanschauung without assigning it a gender or putting it into the genitive case. Come to think of it, we snitched pajamas from India long before Rod got his shalwar kameez from the Punjab. (By the way, did you know that the "kameez" is related to an Arabic work qamis, meaning shirt, which is related to the Latin camisia, also meaning shirt? But etymologists differ on which came first.)

Mr. Sig's Father's Day presents presented an amusing picture of what he's like, for those in the know: Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow; The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin; a new bird feeder (though he had to put it up himself); a hand-blown glass tumbler from Simon Pearce; and "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer," by Walt Whitman, illustrated by Loren Long, with a note from his son: "there were no better parents for me in the whole universe."

It would be easy to deduce some things about him: his love of books, numbers, nature, beauty, the stars, and his family. And it would be easy to guess, as well, that he's loved in return.