Thanks for my dad.

Whoopsies...second missed day.

Of all the blessings to be thankful for in my life, my father, Harry, is way up there near the top. I have inherited a few traits from him (as I type this I am sitting here in my living room wearing my winter coat over my pajamas, for example, and also eating peanut butter) and I want to become more like him. The older I get, the more often this memory pops into my head--which he probably doesn't remember--of when I was about Ida's age, and we were standing in the hallway outside his bedroom and I was recounting to him *In Great Detail* the plot of the book I had just read. The Dollhouse Murders, if you must know. He nodded and asked questions, clearly captivated. At the time I truly thought I was doing him a service by filling him in on this fantastic story. I know better now, and I think of that whenever I want to interrupt Ida (I swear that girl only needs to take like 1/3 of the breaths that an average human needs when she's telling a story) and say, "I really want to hear about this, but can you please go empty the dishwasher?" 

I'm still working on that, but I'm still working on a lot of things. Every day I'm thankful for this wonderful father of mine and thankful that I still have some time to develop that kind of steely patience when my children want to upload to me everything they're thinking about at the end of the day. When I was a child, my father provided for his family that listening ear, along with a safe home, good books, a hopeful outlook, respect for authority, a sense of duty, the benefit of the doubt, stories from the past, an affinity for kitty cats, and above all, an unmatched generosity of spirit. He still does. So thankful for that good, good man.