In Memory of Dad

saying thanks to people from our past

Welcome to the first-ever Blue Room Ask Me Anything, especially for paid subscribers!

Today’s question, submitted by a reader:

We aren’t the people today without those from yesterday. Who’s someone (non-familial) you can’t thank today that made an impact on your life yesterday and what was it?

The questioner was very specific to ask for non-family members, and I’ll honor that request near the end of the article. But to answer the question fully, I need to write about my dad. The twentieth anniversary of his sudden death at age 55 is next week, so he’s been especially in my heart, as well as in my siblings’... in fact, my brother wrote about him recently as well. 

Best I’ve been able to reconstruct the story, it was November of 1980, and I was eight years old. My dad was taking me to school and we were listening to a news report following the election. Paula Hawkins had been elected to represent Florida in the United States Senate. 

The commentator on the news was reporting on the historic nature of Hawkins’s victory: with her election, the Senate was at a high water mark in terms of women Senators elected in their own right rather than serving their husbands’ unexpired terms. Hawkins would join Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, bringing the number of concurrently serving female senators to two.

According to my dad, I was incensed. “Two out of a HUNDRED?! What’s so great about that??” I snapped back at the radio. (And thus began a lifelong hobby of yelling at the news.)

I can’t say whether my outburst was completely independent, or whether Dad prompted me to comment. My guess is that Dad stoked that fire, since that’s what he always did.