All my life, my dad has been The Man. He’s been who I went to whenever I had questions about anything. The reason I went to him was because he always had an answer for me, no matter the question. My dad knew everything there was to know about everything. “I’m never wrong,” he used to say, “I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.(comic irony)”

My dad is pretty tall, like 6’2” ish, and has blond hair and green eyes. If you see him, chances are he will be wearing a Dallas Cowboys shirt(although maybe not much this football season if you know what I mean). He’s looked almost exactly like that for the last 25 years; when looking at photographs we almost always come across a picture of him that we can’t tell when it was taken because it looks like an old picture, but he looks exactly the same. Basically my dad never ages, he’s like Benjamin Button except...not really(Litote).

My dad is the reason that I know everything I do now; if it wasn’t for him I definitely would not be who I am today. When I was little, he would take me and my sister to all kinds of places and teach us about them. He would take us to the Zoo, to Nascar races, to museums, etc; and he would use everything there to teach us new things. He had a lecture about whatever we saw. If you were to watch home videos of us when we were little, you would hear him behind the camera for sure, asking us questions about the world around us. And we would get so excited when we answered because we loved learning new things, we were basically just adorable little nerds. Like in a home video of us at the Zoo when we were about two or three years old, I would say things like, “Hey Daddy, I know what seals eat!” and he would reply, “What do seals eat, Jake?” and I would yell, “They eat squids!” Basically the whole video is us yelling stuff like that, some ‘facts’, some random things like, “Hey Daddy, that bear has a name! That bear’s name is Liz!” So imagine the two or three year old version of me saying stuff like that in an adorable little high-pitched, Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks type voice(hyphenated modifier) for three hours; that’s what my parents had to put up with, but they know they loved it!

My dad had a really fun childhood, he tells us stories from ‘back in the day’ all the time. Some of the things he’s done should be on a sitcom, because they’re hilarious. We sometimes joke about his childhood because he looks the same today as he did like thirty years ago. In our home movies it’s like he got in a time machine and got videotaped, because it’s like it’s the present version of him playing with the three year old versions of us.

If my dad were to be on a game show, he would win hands down. Sometimes I question the fact that he knows everything, but that’s a mistake on my part, because he always proves it. We’ll be watching a game show like ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ or something and when they ask the questions, BAM(onomatopoeia)! He will have said the answer before contestant on the show has even finished reading the question. His attitude for learning really influenced me as a kid. He would help me study in ways that nobody else would do. As a result, I was like the smartest kid in my elementary school. No joke. I won academic awards and stuff like it was no big deal.
My dad was the Yoda to my Jedi(metaphor). He couldn’t be any more awesome if he tried. He taught me how to do everything, even if he didn’t quite know how to do it himself. If there was something that I wanted to do that he didn’t know how to do, he would learn. He would research it and get good at whatever it was, then teach me how to do it so I would be happy. He still continues to teach me today. He still has a lecture about whatever I ask, it seems almost rehearsed because it’s so good at covering whatever subject I need assistance in. Although usually I don’t even have to ask, he just starts teaching. He’ll hand me a newspaper article or something when he sees me and he’ll say, “Here. Read this article and then we’ll talk.” And we get into deep conversations about the happenings of the world.

I’m sure in the future when I come home to visit him and my mom for Christmas or whatever, we’ll have plenty to talk about. I’m sure there will be many a debate going on in the house, just like him and his dad would talk when he came to visit us. He’ll never be done teaching me, and I’ll never be done learning from him. He’s the reason why I am what I am today, and the purpose for me being what I will become in the future.