Father's Day

David Neil Miltenberger

My dad hates mushy stuff. He likes sarcasm and cigars and heavy metal music. He loves my mom and his grandkids (usually in that order). Oh, and he loves us four kids, too! We would never have needed a DVD player on our family car trips, not with Dad along. He delighted in scaring the bejeebies out of us by pretending to veer off the side of a mountain road on our trips across the Cascades. He had us all convinced that a creature named the Glibby-Glurb actually existed, though he was the only one with eyes sharp enough to spot it. And he was always game for. . .well, for a game. I Spy, the Alphabet Game or Twenty Questions, if we were in the car. Outside the car, there was only one game back then: baseball.

My dad with his dad

He has the beautiful box printing of a draftsman, takes infinite delight in children, "gets" teenagers, and plays a wicked game of Spite and Malice. If he answers the phone when I call, he's good for about 30 seconds of conversation before handing me over to Mom, but face-to-face, he's good for conversations that can last all night.
Looking dapper!

I think from him I got the gift of gab, though I'm not in his league by any means; a sense of not taking life too seriously; and the utmost confidence that he believed I could do anything.

Dad holding me at our house in Anchorage.

Happy Father's Day, Dad!