Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother

From my Facebook page:

Someone asked people to post good parental advice on their page. Here's stuff I learned from my Mom. What's your good advice?

You don't need validation from others to be sure that you're doing the right thing.

You can be the smartest person in the room without being a gloating arrogant a** about it, or even pointing it out.

Always give a kid a ride.

Love your kids' friends.

Trust your kids if they've earned it; watch them like a hawk if they haven't.

Be good at what you do because it's the right thing to do and will make you feel good, but don't expect others to notice or appreciate it.

Go outside as much as you can.

Read.

Eat it or wear it. (The family joke ;D)

(I'm the little bald one.)

For Mother's Day, I shared wisdom from my mom. For Father's Day, here's some of what I learned from my dad.

1. Line up the sights before you pull the trigger: This was very literal advice, as my dad was a shooting coach, and I was competent with a gun while my age was still in single digits. It's great metaphorical advice, too. I sometimes want to jump into things without lining things up, and I know that it won't work as well.

2. Fishing wisdom: I can look at a stream or lake and tell you where the fish will be. I can catch them in a tiny trickle of a stream or a deep mountain lake. I know how to rest the line on a sensitive fingertip in order to feel nibbles. I can set the hook. I have homemade bait recipes, I can clean and cook fish, I can cast, I can keep a reel from tangling. I can feed myself, as long as there's water nearby.

Fishing was what my dad and I did together, without the rest of the family. One of his favorite stories from my childhood was "the time Ainsley put you out of the boat." He'd tell it and roar with laughter, no matter how many times he'd already told it. Ainsley was one of Dad's - our - fishing buddies. One day on Frenchmen's, I announced that I had a bite before either man had one. "No, you don't. They're not biting today. You're feeling the bait bump the bottom," Ainsley said. Moments later, I pulled in a nice sized trout.

This continued - "I have a bite!" "No, you don't!" followed by reeling in a fish - until I had caught my limit. Neither man in the boat had gotten a single bite yet. Competitive Ainsley was so miffed that he found a tiny island to leave me on until HE'D caught his limit. I watched the boat go back and forth, back and forth - it was Ainsley's boat, and he wasn't letting me back in until we were even.

Dad loved that story.

3. You don't have to be a parent to parent a child: he helped raise his niece while he was a single man. She called him Unc instead of the more cumbersome Uncle Everett. "He needed a three letter nickname, just like Dad," she explained. He held the same place in her life as her own father - which also taught me that kids can have more than two "real" parents.

4. Do your job to the best of your ability, even if others stop short: The thing my dad did that made me proudest happened before I was born. He worked for the Sparks Fire Department. A fire broke out at the jail - an old style jail, with caged cells and a big iron loop of big, iron keys to open the locks. The fire was so fierce that most responders refused to enter the building, saying that the prisoners had to have already succumbed to smoke, and to risk any men would be foolhardy. Only two people, my dad and one police officer, were willing to venture into the burning jail to let the prisoners out. Those two saved every one of the prisoners.

There were articles in the paper, commendations, awards from service clubs. Dad shrugged them all off. "I was just doing my job. I wasn't going to let men burn to death in cages."

I now own his uniform cap and the awards that hung above the desk during my childhood. None of my kids remember my dad - two never met him, the others were infants when he died - but they know this story.