A List After a Death

My dad died yesterday.

1. Each death one experiences is unique.
2. Each death brings back emtions from previous events.
3. My dad was a complex man.
4. My dad taught me how to golf.
5. My dad taught me how to keep score golfing.
6. I had to learn how to keep score honestly elsewhere.
7. My dad loved life.
8. My dad was a hunter.
9. My dad was a fisherman.
10. My dad played squash and racquetball.
11. My brother in law once hit my dad in the eye with a racquetball shattering his hard contact lens.
12. My dad held the high hurdles record at Penn Hills for years until Hubie Bryant broke it.
13. My dad danced like Bill Cosby before Bill Cosby danced like Bill Cosby.
14. My dad loved his boat and spending time on the river.
15. My dad loved to make you wreck when you were tubing and water skiing.
16. My dad skied in hilarous fashion turning his shoulders into every turn.
17. My dad was my baseball…umpire, not coach.
18. I went on 6 week long fishing trips to Canada with my dad.
19. I saw my first R rated movie with my dad (Police Academy…7th grade).
20. For most of my life he was a better dad than father.
21. My dad was an executive with Westinghouse selling servie for turbine generators.
22. He traveled the world.
23. There’s a lot I don’t know about my dad’s life.
24. That’s ok.
25. My dad loved to go to Erie on family vactions.
26. His nickname there was Taco Tom.
27. That was also his CB handle.
28. My dad was the life of most every party.
29. When I broke a bully’s jaw in 6th grade I had to write a letter saying how I felt.
30. My dad asked me if I wrote, “Damn good.”  I did not.
31. My dad took me to Spain when I was 16.
32. We golfed in Madrid and ate at an amazing restaurant called Solchaga.  It was amazing.
33. He went on to a business trip in the former Yugoslavia while I stayed with friend of his and flew home by myself.
34. Dad was always busy.
35. He was great in the garden.
36. He once told me (while I was leading a bible study with 20 high school kids) to, “Always preach on St. Paul.  He was the only Deigo Jew who preached in Spain.”
37. My dad loved Italian food.
38. My dad was great on the grill.
39. My dad always got credit from his dad for dinner that my mom would spend hours cooking.
40. My dad never punished me.
41. My dad let me learn how to drive a stick in his Fiero GT.
42. My dad loved driving big Lincoln Continentals.
43. My dad loved cigars.
44. My dad directed operations at Pitt Stadium for decades, he was the consummate manager.
45. My dad was not perfect.
46. I had to deal with a lot of hurts and writing one of these really helped me love him.
47. You write it, read it to a trusted loved one (not who you wrote it about), and have them comfort you.
48. My dad loved westerns.
49. He loved watching Quincy and Hogan’s Hero’s.
50. He would exercise watching tv in the most hilarious of ways.
51. He was loved by whoever he met.
52. He was an hilarous employee of Home Depot.  He didn’t follow one rule.
53. He made a commitment to follow Christ at a Promise Keepers event at the Civic Arena.
54. That gives me great peace in these days.
55. He was always too emotional to ever talk about Trey.
56. We called him “The Wind” because he came and went quite randomly.
57. He had a great antagonistic relationship with Rachel.
58. He squirted my kids with hoses on many, many occasions.
59. I don’t know of a better joke teller than my dad.