From City to Mountains; Answering the CallI’ve had a lot more time with my dad than I did with my mom. I’ve learned lots of things from him, some good and some not so much. My dad just passed away a couple of years ago at the age of 75 and he lived with me for the last few months of his life. It wasn’t nearly as hard to think of things I’ve learned from him. He taught me how to shoot a gun, how to shoot a bow and arrow, and an infinite amount of life lessons.
One thing I’ve learned from him was to just be a kid.
As I’ve said multiple times, my dad loved to fish. We’d go as often as he could get away. We often went to this place that I think was called “Rainbow Falls”. It was private I believe, because we had to pay to fish there. They had a hatchery and several “troughs” of fish in various stages of their lives that they used to stock the ponds. My brother and I were free to go from pond to pond to try to see if the water was bluer on the other side. (Did you get what I did there?)
Well, one day we watched these kids dip their poles into one of the troughs. They didn’t have worms on their poles and they were catching fish! My brother and I decided to try our hand at this too. We went and looked in every trough to see which one had the biggest fish in them. We finally picked the one we wanted to try and stuck our poles in. Right away we both got bites and pulled out fairly big fish. Boy! Wasn’t dad going to be so excited to see how big these were?!? We thought if two fish were pretty cool, how much prouder of us would he be if we caught more? So, we caught some more and when we finally thought that he could not be any more proud of us we took our catch back to him and mom.
He beamed brightly and asked us where we had caught these fish and we sort of nodded to the trough area. His smile began to sink a little, as he asked us exactly where we had caught these beauties and we pointed to the exact trough. His smile faded away and he took us and our fish to the office and explained to them what we had done. He told us to go back to mom and so we did. When he came back he didn’t have our trophy fish with him. We asked him why and he told us that they have a limit and we had reached ours before we caught our giant fish and so he had to give them back to them.
He never acted like we had done anything wrong, he just asked us not to fish at the troughs anymore because those were special fish and they needed to have a sporting chance and let into the ponds when they were ready.
Later, much later, I found out as you probably have guessed, we fished the hatchery troughs which was allowed but you had to use a special pole and you paid for the fish you caught by the pound. I never knew how much my dad had to pay for our gigantic record breaking fish that we caught because he allowed us to be kids. He knew we didn’t know better and that had we been told we wouldn’t have gone fishing there. He didn’t make us “work it off”, in fact he let us believe that we had caught the world’s biggest fish and the people in the office wanted them for themselves so the they could have their names in the record books and that’s why they made up the too many fish limit rule in order to take them.
Probably the most important lesson I’ve learned is to not put things off.
I’ve learned from the lives of both of my parents actually to not put things off. I’m not talking little things like cleaning, or doing the laundry, I’m talking big things, life things. My parents always talked about what they’d do “someday”. Their “someday” never came. They were going to learn square dancing and mom was going to buy that cool skirt with all of the ruffles. They were going to go on trips and scuba dive. My dad got certified but couldn’t bring himself to go on those trips they had talked about for so many years. They were going to buy an RV and camp and fish til their heart’s content and he had one for a short period of time. Again, he couldn’t do it, and ended up selling it to a younger version of him and my mom.
My mom was pretty young, only 40 when she died and they had a lot of “tomorrow’s” left, so they thought. My dad would talk about all the things they had planned and never got to do.
His heart broke that day she died and it never healed.
He taught me to love with all of my heart and go all in. He taught me to stop putting off the things I could, and should, be doing today because tomorrow may look a lot different than what I have pictured in my head. He also taught me that love lasts forever and not to take advantage of the ones we love because life may not look like what we want it to look like and someday our “tomorrow’s” are gone.
