A love letter on Father’s Day to the goofiest and best guy I know. My dad | Opinion
Some of my favorite childhood memories are of making breakfast with my dad on weekend mornings. We would prepare French toast or pancakes with blueberries or bananas, and as we mixed the ingredients, he always offered me a sniff of the vanilla extract — a scent that still reminds me of him and our mornings together.
He would always let me choose the music. And, despite his large CD collection, I would usually pick either The Beatles or The Beach Boys, two of his favorite bands.
My dad and his mom — my Grandma Mary — gifted me with my love for baking. He also gifted me with my love for watching (and rewatching) movies. Every Thanksgiving, my family rewatches “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” I think we could perform every line of that movie from memory at this point. “To the wives!”
My dad is a lot like the late actor John Candy, who co-stars with Steve Martin in the 1987 comedy. He has a big laugh, and he can make friends with anyone. He’s always been silly and has always goofed around with me and my sister. But he’s also the hardest worker I’ve ever known.
To pay his way through college, he drove a Coke truck and made deliveries. He was able to transfer from community college to UC Davis, where he met my mom only two weeks into the school year.
According to family lore, my dad noticed my mom at the campus dining commons and wanted to approach her. But she was always surrounded by girlfriends. Coincidentally, they ended up at the same dormitory party and hit it off, leaving to get orange juice at a convenience store off Russell Boulevard. It was the same store I could see out my dorm room window when I attended UC Davis many years later.
At the university, my parents holed up in the campus library. No matter how hard he studied, my dad would always convince himself he would fail his tests. Each time, however, he passed with flying colors. When I asked my parents how they spent Picnic Day, UC Davis’ annual student-run event, they said they spent it in the library.
My mom spent hours in the hot Davis heat helping my dad count mites in the nearby harvest fields (he graduated with a master’s degree in plant sciences and later earned his Master of Business Administration). She must have really loved him, and I think she fell for him because he was responsible, serious about his studies and his future and could provide stability. But more than that, my parents can always joke around with each other, and they can always find something to talk about — whether it’s politics or family updates or just whether or not the grocery store was busy.
When my sister and I were growing up, my dad worked at Hewlett-Packard as a financial analyst. Sometimes, he came home after we had already eaten dinner. And, oftentimes, he would return to our home office to keep working.
My dad made a lot of friends at HP (the bowl of M&Ms he kept on his desk probably didn’t hurt). But the workplace was extremely demanding. Recently, my dad told my sister and me about a co-worker who had stayed late at the office one night to keep working. In the morning, co-workers found him at his desk. They thought he had fallen asleep. Later, they realized he had died in the night.
The story made me realize the extreme demand my dad and his co-workers worked under for years. Later, my dad took a job at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, and his work-life balance greatly improved.
Both my parents worked extremely hard to support our family. And I am so grateful that my sister and I graduated from college without any financial debt, thanks to our parents.
In many ways, my sister and I are very different from our dad — we both have careers in writing, and we’d both rather spend an afternoon at an art museum than, say, watching a sports game. But we have also inherited his studious nature, his strong sense of right and wrong, his passion for baking and cooking, his tendency to be silly and his staunchly liberal politics.
One of my favorite qualities I have inherited from my dad, however, is my passion for lifelong learning. As an avid reader and a genuinely inquisitive person, my dad is always learning something new and sharing this knowledge with us. I think that’s a big part of why I became a journalist. So that I could always be learning, exploring and asking questions, just like my dad.