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Friday, June 16, 2006

Split-Personality Top Ten 

In honor of two events this week, I'm going to split my top ten into two pieces. The first - in view of the World Cup - is the top five funny soccer goals of all time:


The second, in light of this weekend being Father's Day, is the top five things I will never forget about my dad:
  1. He used to always come home on Fridays with a box of Dunkin Donuts, and frequently he would try to sneak into the house without us knowing and hide either himself or the donuts. One such Friday, we heard something to tip us off to the fact that he was in the house, so we began to investigate. Finding the fresh dozen donuts on top of the fridge confirmed our suspicions, but it took us a little longer to find him than usual. When he jumped out from behind the room divider just inside the front door, I nearly peed my pants, first from being startled, and then from laughing so hard at him.
  2. Growing up, I always thought my dad could speak all languages fluently. Come to find out in later life, he probably just knew a couple of phrases really well, and knew how to work them into random conversations. He would drop in a little French (Je ne sais pas), a little Latin (Semper ubi sub ubi), a little Spanish (Como se dice), and sometimes mix them together. He picked up just enough Tagalog to simultaneously be understood and sound silly. However, he was completely fluent, masterful in fact, in Pig Latin. He could speak it so quickly and effortlessly it truly was a foreign language.
  3. The man is a sports nut. Not only could he play basketball like nobody's business, schooling people twice his size in high school (little known fact - he was a pipsqueak until college) and half his age well into his forties, but he also taught me pretty much everything I know about every sport I play. He knew the official rule books like the back of his hand, and never feared pulling them out when arguing his point with the official (when he was the coach) or the coach (when he was the ump or ref). I can't remember seeing him lose an argument over a call, at least in the philosophical and moral sense.
  4. There were only two things that warranted a spanking in our household. The first was direct deliberate disobedience. That was fairly certain to get you a whack with the spoon or something. However, if you lied, the belt was coming off. That was probably the worst part of it, was getting hit with your own belt. It was tantamount to being sent out in the yard to cut your switch. But we learned the value of honesty. It was one thing to do something wrong, but man you'd better tell the truth about it.
  5. My dad loves my mom. From the stories that he tells about their first meeting (... he needed a new ping-pong partner because he had lost the previous night... she was feeding ducks on a bridge... they won), to little gifts he gave her (the twelve bells of Christmas is one that comes to mind), to the sacrifices he made in life to support her, to the way he still looks at her - if there was one thing that I never doubted, it was his complete devotion to her.

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