I want to be just like my dad when I grow up.

If you met my dad, you’d fall in love with him in the first five minutes. He’s a genuinely happy man with a charismatic charm that can be disarming. Suffering from diabetes, taking 10 or more pills a day, grimacing through two knee replacement surgeries and surviving prostate cancer haven’t dampened his spirit. His deep brown skin is lined with the ravages of time, although if you saw him in person you would swear he was at least 10 or 15 years younger than his age. Perhaps it’s in his genes…that’s one reason why I want to be like him when I grow up.

My Daddy (yeah, I still call him Daddy) is 92 years old, and he’s still got ‘it.’ Sure, I worry about him — a lot, but that’s only natural — but generally speaking, he’s killing it. A widower since 2007, he is to me an amazing man. He’s independent, living in the house in which I grew up. He still drives – I know, I know, it shocks me too. He does a lot of his own yardwork (a neighbor’s son does the heavy lifting and mowing for him). On any given beautiful, not too warm spring day, he can be found in the driveway washing his Buick Lucerne from bumper to bumper. Daddy is a pillar of the neighborhood – a man who is respected and loved by his neighbors, even the “young” ones, those in their 60s and 70s, who call him either “Streeter” or “Mr. Streeter.”

All his life, Daddy has been a storyteller. As a member of the U.S. Air Force, he traveled the world and made many friends and acquaintances. Throughout that time, he told hilarious tall tales and would spin a yarn for friends and family alike. When he opens his mouth and begins to regale a captive audience with tales of wrestling snakes, shoving my mother’s eyeball back in after it fell out of the socket and was dangling in the sink, or having bionic parts in his body, he says it with such conviction and in true poker face style that you begin to question your own existence. “Is he telling the truth?” “Is this real?” “Am I even here?!?”

Yeah, that’s my Daddy. He cracks me up. I suspect he may have been a comedian in a past life.

*    *     *

I live about 420 miles from Daddy, and I don’t get to see him very often. The alternative — for a man who tinkers on a computer but has a difficult time grasping the various communications nuances such as Zoom and Skype — is phone calls. I spoke with him this past Friday evening. I was checking in with him to see how he was feeling after his second Covid-19 vaccination. In true Daddy form, he let me know in no uncertain terms that he was fine.

“You know me…I traveled all over the world, all over the Middle East, and every time I went, I had to have at least three shots. I’m a military man. I can handle it.”

I guess he told me! Daddy prides himself on being stoic. He is, after all, a dad to five adult women. He’s everything to us, as we are to him. But deep down, I believe that Daddy is like nearly every other Dad – he doesn’t want to show when he’s in pain or suffering. He would rather ignore it or joke his way out of it.

Still, I had to check on him.

We talked for 20 minutes or so, and at the end of the call, I closed out the conversation the way I have for the past 32 years: “Bye Daddy, I love you,” and he responded in kind. As I was about to end the call, I heard him saying frantically, “Wait! Wait a minute, Valri,” — it’s how he pronounces my name —  “before you go, I’ve got somebody I want you to meet.”

There was a dramatic pause for a more theatrical effect. “She’s gonna be your new mother.”

What the actual hell?!? The rest of the conversation went something like this:

“What? Daddy…wait, what?!?”

“Hold on, she wants to talk to you. Okay, wait…hold on, okay, here she is. Her name’s Sadie.”

Again . . . what the actual hell?!? Actually, if I’m being honest here, I wasn’t too surprised by this recent comic development. It’s in my Daddy’s nature to try and pull a fast one over everyone. So I played along, even as I tried to stifle a giggle.

“Hello,” an unnaturally shrill, high-pitched obviously fabricated voice invaded my ear.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Sadie.”

Sadie my foot. “Hi there Sadie. So Sadie, where’re you from?” I guess “Sadie” wasn’t expecting to play 48 questions.

A few seconds passed before “Sadie” answered. “D.C.” 

“D.C., huh? What part of D.C.?” I tried to suppress my laugh, but I wasn’t succeeding very well.

Silence. After several moments, I heard, “Northeast.” I hear snickering on the other end of the line, which was my cue to break out in full-on laughter.

Classic Daddy.

“You thought there was a Sadie here, didn’t you?” he asks as he cracks up at his own humor.

“Uh, no Daddy, no.” And I laughed right along with him.

Daddy loves a good laugh. Perhaps it’s part of the reason he’s lived so long. His approach to life isn’t one of doom and gloom. He tries to see the good and the funny in everything. And he likes to spread that to others. Now do you see why I want to be like him when I grow up?

He’s a man that could be angry with the world. Angry at the abject racism he was subjected to for the better part of his life – in the military when he was out in the world fighting for us and our freedom, on the home front, in the world in general. But see, that’s not who my Daddy is. He’s a forgiving man, he’s a gracious man, he’s an empathetic man. And he’s a lying-through-his-teeth-just-to-make-you-laugh man.

He’s my Daddy. And I want to be just like him when I grow up.