Today would’ve been my dad’s 78th birthday. In remembering him, I started thinking about the qualities I inherited from him:
- Depression
- My thousand-yard stare
- The tendency to obsess over the tiniest little things
- A deep, abiding, and not easily understood love for the Andy Griffith Show and professional wrestling
- The ability to hear poetry in the crack of a baseball bat on a warm summer’s night
- A love of the land and wide open spaces
- Being a gentle grouch
- Big feet and big hands
- His nose
- Feeling lost without a wristwatch
- A desire to serve in the military*
- A deceptively slow fuse
* After high school (and three years in ROTC), I wanted to enlist in the Marines as a way of paying my way through college. Dad had been in the Army during the Korean War, and one of my brothers had been in the Air Force. Dad said I could go into any branch of the service I wanted — except the Marines, and of course, for me it was the Corps or nothing. Dad wasn’t adamant about very much, but he was dead set against his little girl going into the Corps. It wasn’t until after he died that I found out why. He’d been discharged from the Army for fighting with a Marine while in Korea. So not only did I get my desire for military service from him, I got his ability to carry a grudge for decades. 
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