The Failure of My Father

My father, for many years, considered himself a failure.  He had a Masters Degree in a field in which he had never become a professional.  He was entirely overqualified for a fairly menial job for the county government. 

He is a loving father who has overlooked that his curiosity has become the foundation for my own education.  His failure professionally never crossed the mind of his two boys and daughter who, growing up, saw him as a wealth of knowledge from which experience was constantly opportunity. 

That possibility would find itself in the most innocuous locations.  I remember

stopping along side a random highway or a dirt road, or a remote airfield somewhere out in the middle of nowhere and exiting the car suddenly finding a classroom around me. 

My father instantly became a teacher, showing me the wheat field that I had nonchalantly passed on journeys before.   The hanger which garaged single engine Cessnas was a giant room of learning; a previously unused bit of random knowledge about planes became a world of newness to me as I touched the wing and began to see the places it could take a person, and the places of where knowledge could possibly take me.

Once we stopped in a cornfield to pick the vegetable straight from the stalk ourselves, eliciting a response from the unnotified farmer who was upset at our trespassing.   I also learned the art of negotiation and the value of friendliness as this irate farmer melted under the negotiation power of my father to suddenly become an educator himself, passing over bags of corn for us to leave with after explaining planting and the layout for his field. 

My father created in me the learner that saw possibility and excitement in everything I encountered.  He unlocked a passion for seeing the world and the people who inhabited it as reasonable and worth experiencing and understanding.

My brother, sister and I one got to sit in an original Model T because his sheer will to impart the desire to educate us about it overtook the owner’s misgivings about the fragility of the antique.  When my sister sat on the tail fin of a resting glider parked next to a runway, and the owner came roaring down the concrete path threatening police intervention, I thought the world of exploration and learning was ending.  But after only three minutes, we were sitting in the cockpit being given a quick lesson on how to fly.

And that is how my learning has been: the possibility of where I will fly to.  And the experience is something that I try to impart on my son.  The curiosity of my father has created the possibility of me.  And soon, I will be stopping alongside the road to explore the world with my own son, showing that any failure my father had in his had as a career was actually a success in the raising of a son.