Saturday, June 19, 2010

Thank You Daddy

Its that time of year again... The obligatory Father's Day Post. I often talk about how wonderful my father was. Anyone that knows me knows that I am a bona-fide Daddy's girl. But Daddy also taught me many important lessons.

Lesson 1
Keep your cool at all times... I can count on my hand the amount of times I saw my father truly angry. Your anger means more when you don't blow your top all the time.

Lesson 2
Be a Jack/Jane of all trades. We never paid anyone to do anything. My father bought a car book and fixed the car. The roof was messed up, he repaired the roof. Dad wanted a garden.. He planted one. He was a self-sufficient man. Now I am by no means that good, but I can read a book and learn to do things, because my father modeled that behavior for me. Just think, if he had lived to see youtube, he would be dangerous.

Lesson 3
Help folks in spite of their situations. Daddy helped folks who he knew were gonna mess up again. Lent money to folks he knew were never gonna pay him back, and did it without them ever hearing about it again. He saw a need and didn't just talk about it. He met it. Its the hardest thing in the world to do.

Lesson4
Sometimes you have to be a community parent/partner. My Daddy was everyone's daddy. To some degree. He filled in where my cousins' dad's left off. If their daddy wasn't there, but they could always depend on Uncle Calvin, and they did. (Many times I hated this, but now I understand why he did it.) He was the one dependable man we had in our extended family, and he took his job way seriously. My aunts all knew that they could depend on him.

Lesson5
Its never too late to get and Education. My father had to leave school when he was young because he didn't have the money to continue to go. Once he had a family, he knew that he wanted to finish school. Did that mean he stopped working.... nope. He worked a 40 hr workweek. He also played basketball at his school and helped me with my homework every night. There is no reason why you can't do it. (He encouraged me to get my Master's Degree, and I am so glad I did. He died three months later.)


Happy Father's Day



1 comment:

Mrs. Tenkely said...

Your father was a wonderful man and taught so many valuable lessons for us all.