My father is my best friend.
He’s the most avid reader you’ve ever met; he reads about three books a week. To add onto that, he reads articles and articles of anything you could think of, sending me gifs out of nowhere of things like “king rats” with an article attached about them.
He always supports me in anything and everything I want to do. When I started playing soccer, he went to classes to learn how to become a coach. He studied and researched it into startling depths, where he was sending me packets of research every week on working out. He forced me to go out into the yard with him and practice, even when I was young and sulky.
He read my first piece of writing when I was six. It was some nothing about frogs, and they caught a fly that turned out to be a bomb. I didn’t know how to use pronouns, and it was hard to read. It didn’t matter. He saw the potential in it. In fifth grade, my teacher made me do a personal essay. I blew it out of proportion, writing almost forty pages. My dad read every page almost three times. He still brings it up to this day with marvel in his eyes.
He got so excited about everything I wrote, no matter how terrible it was. It didn’t matter, because I was trying. Being such an avid reader, he always wanted to write more than anything else, and he had wonderful and bright ideas, but he never could put them down on paper. He was too self-conscious. He supported me in every way possible with it, even making me listen to really lame audio books.
My father wanted to be a professor in Geology before I was born. He was already with my mother, taking care of her two children from a previous relationship. He didn’t have to take care of Aislynn and Arianna, my two half-sisters (not that it made us any less close), but he chose to. He worked odd jobs to support everyone, but when my mom got pregnant with me, he had to drop out with only a Bachelor’s degree. It was just months before he gained his Master’s.
There are certain memories of him that I’ve found playing in my head lately. Like how he would rant on absolutely anything he found interesting for two hours, just like a true professor. I remember when he told me last month that his IQ was of genius level; then he told me not to tell my mother to spare her feelings.
Most of all, though, I remember when I was ten. I was convinced my father knew absolutely everything, and he was never wrong. We were making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He told me you should always use peanut butter first with the butter knife, because otherwise jelly gets in the peanut butter, and jelly has to go in the fridge while peanut butter goes in the pantry. I told him jelly was easier to wipe off, and it was so miniscule that it didn’t matter anyways. He agreed with me. That is the first time I considered that my father was not some all-knowing being.
He does the oddest jobs, like he built an Indian fireplace the other month that doesn’t create smoke for no reason. It was the hardest thing to build, but it didn’t matter. He enjoyed learning about it and doing it.
My father is the most fantastic person I have ever known.