my dad was a weirdo.

 

In a culture consumed with seeming cool, my dad was an outcast.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve seen the high school pictures. His long blonde hair and pooka shell necklace- my dad thought he was cool. But in the days I knew him, the twenty-six years I knew him on this planet, Dad didn’t spend much time trying to be “cool.”

TWR lived large. I think he left the earth with very few regrets, which is really saying something since he died so suddenly, and, by many definitions, young. I think a lot of that has to do with how he lived – how well he loved others, where he based his faith and his worth, and how silly he was on a daily basis.

When I was little, Dad made even going to bed fun. I can remember him getting us to “blow” out the lights like we were blowing out a candle, and he’d subtly flip the light switch at just the right moment to turn out the light. He dressed up as a clown for one of mine and Gentry’s birthday parties – head to toe, we’re talking. Picture a short, skinny version of Cam from Modern Family. Our very own Fizbo.

My dad made life interesting. He made it fun. He made it an adventure to be around him.

In high school, I somehow was on our homecoming court senior year. The five of us brought our dads to  a weeknight practice with the band, getting ready for the actual football game coming up that weekend. My dad brought Bubba teeth in his pocket and wore them during all of practice. He really liked our class principal and thought it would make him laugh. I was half mortified and half beaming with pride that this weirdo belonged to me.

I remember helping him plan t-shirts for his softball team - he was playing with his Young Life high school guys while he was a leader. The Narwhals, he chose as the mascot. What a goofball! You know the animal from the movie Elf with the long tusk like a unicorn? Yep. Silly. But those guys thought he was cool. 

When Kelsey, Stephanie, and I lived in an apartment in the Heights, Dad snuck through an office parking lot to climb the concrete walls of the bayou that our windows overlooked. He used a bucket full of sidewalk chalk and wrote our initials and alma mater logos on the concrete for all to see. (He did this I am sure just so he could draw a giant UT sign for Steph) – and he wrote “Happy First Day” – which I saw in the wee hours before my first day as a teacher with Teach For America.

Some dads might have been as thoughtful as him, and sent their daughter flowers. Not mine. No, he risked getting a ticket for graffiti and sidewalk-chalked White Oak bayou to show he cared.

My mom tells the best Tom stories, tales of the prankster in action. There are legendary stories from each of their New York Life study group meetings – including the time they had run out of space in the rent cars when the large group went to dinner. So Tom offered to ride in the trunk – for fun, my mom reminds everyone. And then at red lights he would bang on the trunk from inside to freak out the people in other cars. Silly. Hysterical. Never a dull moment. 

What I love most about the author Bob Goff (Love Does, read it already!) is that he draws you in to his life, inspires you to live boldly, without throwing bible verses in your face or being “preachy.” He’s just real. And he’s goofy. And he’s fun and exciting and makes everyone feel like they matter. All things that make me want to be more like my dad.

Gentry is like my dad in countless ways, and I know his Hans alter-ego is something straight out of Tom's book. (But Gentry has Saturday-Night-Live quality accents. Dad had ... none.)

We spent years witnessing important lessons, never knowing that someday soon all we’d have were those laugh out loud memories of a hilarious man.

Though my dad was very successful in business, that was not always the case. He fought long and hard for that "success." I love in the speech my mom gave this past year for New York Life agents that she mentions how he was fired from a bank in the late 80s when Gentry and I were little. Not a good time to be fired. Not a way to "look cool." 

But no matter my parent’s bank account status or his stress level, no matter how many toys he had at the time (from zilch to boats and planes) my dad found the time to be joyful. To be funny. To be goofy. To make life an adventure. Whether he was driving a beat-up Ford Taurus on it's last leg or a brand new fancy Acura (ordered from Costco, he was so proud of that) road trips were a riot with this man. Adventure was the goal, what you were driving was just a detail. 

To Tom, age was merely a number. Coolness was subjective. Life was, as Helen Keller said, a daring adventure, or it is nothing. I don't want to have nothing. Tom reminds me to get off my couch. To talk to strangers. To smile at people. To stop worrying what people think and just do stuff.

Our final silliness story – my dad LOVED flying his little blue plane and because it was open air, he could fly low and have his passenger (or himself) throw nerf balls out to campers at Camp Longhorn or boats on Lake LBJ. He would write names on them and “deliver” to people. It made his day more than it made theirs. He had people all the time at Lake Marble Falls ask to go flying with him. Never once did he say no. 

He was like Summer Santa – instead of a sleigh with reindeer, it was a little blue plane and a short little man. He would do a “gum drop” for their annual Young Life trip to the lake and throw gum out of the plane for kids to catch. He did this often to boats, too, and people began to recognize the blue plane. "Oh, that crazy man is gonna throw us something!"

Usually, someone else would throw while he piloted the plane – and the wind would knock some pieces right back in your face and into the plane. Sometimes you'd find stray pieces by your feet from his last drop, pieces that had blown back in instead of flying out. 

When the FAA inspected the plane after Dad’s crash, they came to the house in Houston to give us preliminary reports and answer any family member’s questions.

The FAA rep was personal and patient with us. We were huddled together in the living room. 

“You know, when we took the tail off the body of the airplane, we found something I had never seen in all my decades with the FAA.” Long pause. “And I don’t think I’ll ever see anything like it again.” 

Long pause.

 “We found handfuls of Double Bubble bubble gum in the tail of the airplane. Can someone explain that?”

“Every day God invites us on the same kind of adventure. It's not a trip where He sends us a rigid itinerary, He simply invites us. God asks what it is He's made us to love, what it is that captures our attention, what feeds that deep indescribable need of our souls to experience the richness of the world He made. And then, leaning over us, He whispers, "Let's go do that together.” 
― Bob Goff