Still missing you..Love you always

When I was going through my dad’s things I stumbled across this book called “How to be an explorer of the world”. The book is filled with concepts such as “Everything is interesting. Look closer” or “Notice patterns. Make connections.”, or “Create a personal dialogue with your environment”. I have to be honest, I was surprised to find a book like this in my dad’s possessions. This is not a mentality that I associated with my dad growing up. If asked about this book as a teenager I would have been very confident that my dad had bought it by mistake, or maybe somebody that does not know him very well gifted it to him. And yet my teenage self must have been wrong, because these mentalities were instilled in me one way or another, whether through nature or nurture. I am somebody that wants to see every nook and cranny of this world before I leave it. I am somebody that purchased a kayak because I absolutely could not tolerate going one more minute standing on a fishing pier of a creek or river and not being able to see what was around the first bend. I had to have a way to go and find out what was there. To get to that place that no roads or trails could lead me to. If you look at my dad’s last several years you can really start to see this book’s idea of “Being an Explorer of the World” begin to shine through. I believe this is a large part of what he was trying to do with his final years and you only need to take a quick glance at the photos on his facebook page to see that he succeeded.

I am not saying that this book was his inspiration. I’m not even sure if he read it. But finding the book is what got me thinking of my dad with this frame of mind. Armed with his newfound hobby of photography as an excuse he explored the world around him to the best of his ability, taking day trips to places I never would have thought he had an interest in visiting unless I was the one pestering him to take me there. And now more than ever I do wish that I had been there with him.

I shared all of this with you to give some context to a memory that I wanted to share. This memory has always been important to me but now I see it in a new and even better light. I now know that through his actions in this memory my dad was encouraging my fervent desire to explore the world around me, something that we very likely had in common, even if he was not always able to act on it. I do not know the exact age, but when I was around 9 or 10 years old my childish brain had a dream. A dream that it was very passionate about. I had plans that when I was bigger, stronger, when I was an adult, I would get dropped off at the border of Georgia and Florida with a bicycle and a backpack of supplies, including a tent. Over the course of months, years, however long it took, I would ride that bicycle the entire length of Florida, seeing everything that there is to see along the way, down to the southern most point, where someone would be waiting with a car to take me home after my adventure. I thought about this plan every day for years. One day I told my dad about it and he told me to hop on my bike and get to riding. He told me to ride in one direction as far as I possibly could. He would follow behind me in the car and when my legs could not bring themselves to rotate the pedals one more time he would put my bike in the trunk and drive me home. At the time I was not allowed to ride my bike further than a block from the house and this was the most exciting thing in the world to me.  Now I view the memory through the warped perception of a child, who knows how far I really rode that day, but it certainly seemed like I was a very long way from home before we finally loaded my bike into the car and headed back.

I probably don’t need to tell you that I have never ridden a bicycle across the state of Florida, but if I had done it I bet my dad would have been down in the keys waiting to congratulate me and drive me home. There are a hundred things I could say about my dad. Maybe this isn’t the best one to choose. But it means a lot to me. Try to be an “Explorer of the World” while you have the chance. I know I will and while I do I will think of my dad and know that he is proud of me. Also, I love you dad.