A Father's Day Tribute

My father and myself circa 1970

I can not say enough about the man who is my father. He like me, is a genealogist and loves history. He was the quiet kind of father who worked hard, came home, read his paper, ate his dinner and was off to bed at an early hour to do it all over again the next day. He was and is someone I can depend on, he has your back. He and my mother supported me through the many tough times in my life and I do not know what I would have done without either one of them. "Here," he would say slipping me twenty dollars when my kids were young, "I know you need this."
How many weekends did he set up his film projector and large projection screen in the backyard, type up little movie tickets on construction paper and let me hand them to my friends for admittance to a free back yard matinee? He patiently popped popcorn and sat through the evening manning the reels, showing us first a cartoon and then the main event just like the theater. How many kids did he introduce to the old time films? Today when I see someone from the old neighborhood they always say, "I remember your dad and those movies!" When we were in the old Chevy truck together, it had no radio and I would say "Why don't you sing Dad?" He would sing Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah. I never got tired of hearing it.
I never heard my dad say, I love you. He was quiet that way, he showed you he loved you by the things he did. However, when I was having my first child, I had toxemia and things were very bad for me and they thought I was not going to live. I will in my entire life never forget the anguish I saw in my father's eyes as he held my hand and tried to comfort me. I knew then that he loved me and when he had to leave me he said, the words. That was like a shell breaking around him, he never once since then has not told me he loves me before leaving. He may have his foibles like any human, but I love him and is my father and I am so proud to be his daughter.