It’s Father’s Day, and I’ve been thinking about the fire I come from.
My father was, without question, a polymath. He graduated high school at seventeen because, as he put it, it just made more sense to go straight through summer school and make them teach me next year’s classes. He finished college by nineteen, summa cum laude in both English and mathematics. He tried teaching high school but was too young to be taken seriously, so he joined the Navy instead.
He could draw blueprints, butcher a hog, repair a carburetor, write poetry in perfect iambic pentameter, and calculate angles in his head faster than most calculators could blink. One day he’d teach calculus, the next he’d dig a well, the next he might write a full program in assembly language. At different points both the Department of Defense and NASA sought him out to teach logic, programming, and how to write clearly.
He built houses. He built arguments. He built altars of opinion. He could quote Yeats or Pope, then tear down an engine before lunch. And somehow he always had a dollar for what mattered.
But the same fire that lit up his brilliance also scorched everything close.
His temper was sudden and fierce – a kind of heat you learned to flinch from before it even arrived. Until I was about four years old I thought my name was Jesus Christ. His tongue was fast, sharp, and often cruel. And when the bottle came out – and it came out every night around eight, rain or shine – you never knew if the evening would end in stories, shouting, or both. Sometimes worse.
He was intolerant of fools, impatient with weakness, and often unable to forgive. Especially himself.
Still, he taught me.
Not always with words. Sometimes with silence. Sometimes with the back of his hand. But I learned. How to sharpen tools and hold a line. That knowledge and skill matter, and that discipline – real, gut-level, sweat-earned discipline – matters even more.
He taught me to build. To fix. To try even when it’s hard, especially when it hurts.
I’ve spent most of my life trying not to become him. But I’ve also spent it becoming the best parts of him anyway.
We don’t all get gentle fathers. Some of us are shaped by flint and pressure, not warmth and safety. But fire is still fire – even when it burns instead of glows, it transforms.
He taught me how to:
Play chess at a master’s level, but also lose convincingly at the last second because other people have feelings too. Plan anything from back to front and have it land with the precision of a Mission Impossible plot – in your head, while waiting for the bus. Turn a junk drawer into a working blender with no advance notice. Calm a drunk, angry, grieving man in a way that wouldn’t get you slugged – the trick being to act drunk yourself and commiserate until they’re ready to sleep. Paint well with oils, because it’s the illusion of reality, not the imitation, that matters. Integrate a complex polynomial in your head. Tell the time by watching the sun. Renovate a house from attic to basement – clean angles, code-compliant wiring that inspectors photograph, plumbing that doesn’t leak. Stretch a bare-bones grocery budget into tour-of-Europe cuisine by Thursday. Spot logical fallacies in casual conversation and gently guide people back to clarity.
I don’t honor him because he was kind. He wasn’t. Or because he was particularly loving – his concept of love was different. I honor him because I carry the better parts of him forward. And I get to choose which parts to keep, and what the fire makes of them now.
That’s principle seven: be who you are. Even a bent wire can carry a great light. He was considerably bent. So am I. The light, I’m told, still gets through.
Happy Father’s Day to the ones who forged us, for better or worse. And to those of us still forging, one hard-won truth at a time.