It was my dad’s birthday yesterday! Things you need to know about my dad: He’s a sailboat captain so that’s what I call him, The Captain. He’s always been the one who can fix anything and I know this because I’ve been able to break things you didn’t think a person could break, bring it to him, and he’d fix it. He also has taught me a lot! Like how to take my first tequila shot and how to determine where the wind is coming from to get the boat to go the right way. But my favorite thing he ever taught me was how to answer questions for yourself. Often as kids we would go to him and ask “Hey dad, why (insert random question)?” His answer was always the same “Go look it up.” And in our younger years looking it up meant going to our shelf of gigantic encyclopedias and once the answer was found reporting back to him what we learned. It has translated to my adult life and gotten much easier with Google. Now when I think to myself “why do we use the phrase “dirt poor”?” I can hit the internet, learn that having a floor that was anything other than dirt back in the day was the epitome of opulence, so if you didn’t have that you were “dirt poor”.
So Happy Birthday to The Captain and thank you for all you’ve taught me to teach myself!
