My second Father’s Day without my dad

Mustaches
Aviator sunglasses
Led Zeppelin
Deep Purple
Neil Young’s Harvest album
Minnesota Vikings
San Diego Chargers
Minnesota Twins
San Diego Padres
Los Angeles Dodgers
Seeing golf being played on TV
Seeing NASCAR on TV
John Wayne movies
Western movies
The movie Top Gun
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
The sound of a lawnmower
The smell of cut grass
The smell of meat on the grill
The smell of gasoline
The smell of cigarette smoke
Jorts
Wrangler jeans
Milwaukee’s Best
Seeing wallets bulging out of the back pockets of jeans
Hearing men acknowledge their little girls as “Mija”
The sound of jet noise
Early 1990’s Chevy IROC Z28 Camaros
Old VW Beetles

This is my second Father’s Day without my dad. It’s funny how we remember people. The most random things trigger memories of my dad. It’s so strange. It’s as if I see him more in my day-to-day life than ever before.

When I see the objects listed above, go through the experiences, smell, hear, witness those things… I get a jolt of him in my mind. And for split second, he’s here, with me. And from all that, my mind flashes a random memory, thought, lesson from my past. A memory where he instilled in me a certain value, a principle of integrity, of ethics, of what it means to be a good person.

We didn’t have the closest relationship, but close enough to establish a sense of respect, trust, and of course love.

When I started my studio, The Determined, I showed him our simple one-page website. I described our mission of the studio, our services, our vision of a world we wanted to create. He looked at me, and said, “Ok. Well, get to work.”

That was him. Direct and to the point. He was a man full of tremendous love. I miss him.

(I wrote about my first Father’s Day without my dad here.)