I’m sure that the way I saw my dad is different from how some of you may have seen him. It’s clear that he was great at being the kind of person that was most needed to whoever needed him. When he would tell me stories I would get a glimpse of the many facets to his personality, but this is who he is to me.
Dad to me is the perfect model of masculinity. Strong and brave for sure but also gentle, thoughtful and caring. Quick to help, slow to anger and patient in the infinite. So many times we worked together he would be teaching me something new, and after I did it wrong over and over again he could sense when I was becoming frustrated. Instead of getting mad, he would just step back, chuckle a little and say something like “That’s one way to do it, but can I show you another?” with a big grin on his face and usually an arm around my shoulders.
The first time I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance it felt like my dad had written it. Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality resonated with me because as a philosophy it just felt like talking with my dad. He didn’t demand Quality, he revered it. He could recognize it in anything and was drawn to it. He taught me to pursue and appreciate it, and while this can sometimes conflict with a world that doesn’t always value Quality, I treasure how he taught me to perceive it.
But to call him a perfectionist is an oversimplification, because it wasn’t that he expected perfection, but that he was always improving; using better materials, better techniques, better processes. Once he watched me bend wire around a dowel by hand to make chainmaile for about ten minutes before he started sketching-up a machine to automate the process. Pretty soon he was bringing me down in the basement to show me the fully-working prototype, which I still have in my basement, that did the work that took me an hour in about a minute. He helped me like this countless times, usually working together and always learning something new.
When it was my turn to become a father, I was grateful to have been given so much grace as a child because it made it easy to extend that to my own. I’ve had more opportunities than I can count to use the skills he taught me to maintain our house and make it a home, but the most important skill of all has been how to be a strong but compassionate father.
Now that his time here is at an end, I think a lot about how to remember him and I think the best I can do is share with others what he shared with me. To keep him with us, live as he did: always curious, endlessly patient, fixing what is broken and finding ways to do it better each time around.