As I continue stumble closer to this thing called adulthood, I’ve begun to see the people that I’ve known my whole life a bit differently. Those people probably (hopefully) see that I have changed in these last twenty years—I mean, I still go to bed at around the time your average third grader falls asleep, but I can drive and wear high heels (well, sort of). They treat me differently, as I continue to grow and mature, and it is truly fascinating to reacquaint myself with my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles as a semi-adult. This is especially true with my dad.
I wrote a few months ago about how truly wonderful my mother has been throughout the entirety of my life, and I am only now truly beginning to appreciate who my father is and what he does for me and our family. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve admired my father’s intelligence, athleticism, and sense of humor for as long as I can remember. But while my mother has stayed home to answer my anxious mid-day phone calls and make me fluffernutter sandwiches on Friday, I only really got to spend time with my dad during the evenings and weekends.
Still, no matter how exhausted or frustrated his work had been that day or week, he was always willing to spend time playing with us or helping us with our homework as we got older. He was our biggest fan in all of the sports my brothers and I played throughout our childhoods (even now, as I have continued to run in college). There is no Disney movie he is too embarrassed to see, and he has inspired my love for heist movies and John Hughes films (I’m not just talking the classics…Weird Science, for example). He is the reason that I am currently listening to a mixture of Miles Davis and film scores while I write this article and work on other homework.
But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to admire and strive to mirror a few qualities that I couldn’t pick up on when I was younger. His dedication, for one: after nearly a year involving a bike accident, three surgeries, and a host of hamstring issues, my dad continues to run and bike. And parallel to that, I admire his remarkable strength in dealing with various obstacles and tragedies, including being let go from a job and losing a child. Additionally, he is genuinely the smartest person I have ever met—not only in terms of intellectual brilliance, but in emotional intelligence as well.
His sense of humor in particular is a quality that I have come to appreciate even more as I grow up. I always knew he was funny, but it wasn’t until I was old enough to actually get the jokes that I came to realize how hysterical he truly is. It goes beyond his own sharp wit, though: he also appreciates other people’s sense of humor. When my brothers are heckling each other over the dishes after dinner, I laugh even harder when I see my dad hooting and egging the two on, entirely swept up in the comedy of the moment and adding his own comebacks to the mix.
Above all, though, it is his confidence that I admire the most. In a way, it’s the culmination of all of the other things I mentioned above, but there’s an additional strength that I personally strive to emulate whenever I can. My dad has never cared what other people think of him. He’ll watch Disney movies in theaters after the age of fifty, provide better fashion sense than most of my friends, let toddler-Taylor paint his fingernails, sprint through grocery store parking lots to get shotgun before the rest of us, and he will always put on the paper crowns they give you at Burger King. When he finds me worrying about my outfit choice for an event or listens to me overanalyze the tiniest details in interactions, my dad will listen to my woes, smile softly, shake his head, and quietly ask, “Who cares what anyone else thinks?”
Just before I came back to Kenyon for the Spring semester, my dad and I spent the end of the week in New York City. I was job shadowing a librarian in the city on Thursday and taking the bus back to Kenyon on Saturday, so we spent three days alone together. My dad had lived and worked in New York right after he and my mom got married, so it was incredible to wander with him through the city he loves. We ate at his favorite restaurant (Katz’s… he gets the pastrami on rye, which is the biggest sandwich I have ever seen); walked through the St. Regis (where he worked); went to the Natural History Museum (I’m not gonna say it was because of Night at the Museum, but it sort of was); and met up with two of his cousins for a musical reading and dinner (where I learned a great deal more about his college days than he probably wanted me to). We also ate a half-pound of M&M’s in less than half an hour while walking through Times Square.
Before those three days in New York, I can’t tell you the last time I spent more than a day with just my dad. In those three days, I came to appreciate him as not only the man who raised me to be a strong, intelligent, trying-as-hard-as-she-can-to-be-confident young woman, but as a truly remarkable human being whom I am lucky enough to call my dad.
This one’s for you, Dad. You don’t hear it enough and are too humble to admit it yourself, but you’re amazing. There aren’t enough thanks in the world for everything you have done for our family, and I hope you enjoyed those three days in New York as much as I did, because I can honestly say that those seventy-two hours were some of my favorite hours on this planet, and it is because I shared them with you.
Love, Punkin.
Image credits: Taylor Hazan, 2