Okay, well, let's post our happy memories of our fathers.
For me, I was orphaned as a kid, so I will list the memories of my uncle, who adopted me and treated me like his own kid, and then my foster father, who adopted me later when my uncle became sick and then died. There are hundreds and hundreds of fond memories, but I'll stick just a few in here.
Uncle: He was always playing with the kids. When I was about six, and my brother eight, the four of us (brother, two little cousins, and I) became fascinated by running up the escalators in the airport which were going down. Rather than yelling at us for this, he joined in. We raced up that downward escalator several times, eventually we had strangers cheering on one or another of us as we raced to the top. When the time came to stop (kids don't know when to stop this kind of thing), he basically "switched subjects" so that we weren't upset by having to stop, but moved naturally on to the next thing.
Another memory was waking up with my arms wrapped around a blow-up dinosaur as a present, one morning. What was the occasion? No occasion.
On St. Patty's day our cereal was foodcolored green. We were very young at this time. Our uncle told us, with a straight face, that there were leprachauns in the garden. We ran out to see them, and searched everywhere but unfortunately never found them.
My uncle got me into everything -- swimming lessons, boxing lessons. With his encouragement, I became the second fastest 8-year old swimmer in the U.S. southwest region. I still love swimming. He also bought me my first computer and several subsequent computers, and I cut my teeth on them. There's a picture of me at six years old losing in chess to an Atari 800
Years later I loaded up an emulator and beat that stupid thing. At the time he encouraged me to go deep. By seven I was coding in BASIC, I wrote a solver for the Towers of Hanoi problem -- with graphics!
Tony -- my adoptive dad. Taught my foster brother and I how to get along -- no small feat. Now we're good friends. Taught me how to iron and cook. Unfortunately I have food allergies now and can't enjoy my own cooking, but on rare occasions I will cook for my wife, when I work up the nerve to work with the dangerous (to me) ingredients.
Tony also taught me how to haggle, and in interpersonal relationships, how to stand up for myself and not get bowled over by whoever wanted to do it.
Tony was a Catholic priest, and yet he didn't demean me for switching to Asatru (a pagan religion). Rather he was supportive. He even found things in common between them.
He died many years ago and was buried in Punchbowl, with full military honors, as he was a two-war veteran. I visit him every year on father's day (though I missed it last year), but 2 or 3 times in the year otherwise.
