1. God
2. My father
3. His encouragement and belief in me
4. I’ve written about his generosity and think of when my cousin told me how my father helped him when he was young and starting a new family with a baby. I was proud to say that’s the kind of man he is.
5. He instilled in me a love of music, mostly because there was always music playing in our house (and still is, presumably,) on the radio or with records, or he would play the piano or harpsichord
6. We could sit in silence for long times, driving some distances, then he would ask me questions
7. My father is always reading. Some books he’s read multiple times. I think he’s particularly fond of Dickens, Trollope, Jane Austen, and also likes biographies.
8. I had no curiosity about his work and it wasn’t until early in my working days that I discovered some of what he worked on, cited in a reference book, data compression algorithms that eventually made possible the graphics interchange format, commonly known as the .gif.
9. He worked hard and supported our family. When the news came that the research center where he worked was going to move to Virginia, his question to the company was will you move my wine. When it became clear he needed to change jobs, he didn’t make a fuss, but essentially walked down the road and found himself a job and worked for another dozen years.
10. And his kindness to my children
11. He still does crossword puzzles, double crostics even, and loves that ken ken
12. Still quite active in his 80s, though sometimes gets disoriented and flummoxed by life (so do I.)
13. My mother told me yesterday he was riveted with watching the golf tournament, interesting because he didn’t golf to my knowledge when I was growing up.
14. Happy Father’s Day, Dad
13.