I have my father’s eyes. Sometimes I wonder if I share his vision as well.
Perhaps in some ways I do. We both have bad tempers we’ve learned to control. We both appreciate travel, Motown music and family history, and we both have a limited tolerance for nonsense.
Fortunately, his tolerance for a bit of gentle ribbing is less limited, because Tuesday is his birthday, and I plan to remind him that he is really, really old. Actually, he’s not, but I enjoy giving him a bit of trouble when I can.
A few years ago, I played an April Fool’s Day joke that involved a convoluted (and entirely, emphatically, false) story about company bankruptcy. Dad, bless him, advised me calmly and reassuringly over the phone and email all day, until the early evening when I asked, “Have you looked at a calendar today?”
After rewarding me with a few choice (unprintable) words, he was clearly proud. And, I imagine, relieved. But indeed proud. After all, this is the man who taught me how to short sheet a bed before I went off to summer camp when I was 8, and who reenacted a scene from “Coming to America” on the balcony of an Israeli hotel room in 1993.