As Father’s Day approaches, I’ve been thinking non-stop on what I want to tell my father. Of course, I’ve also been thinking about what to get the man that loves only to wear one specific t-shirt and made me believe throughout my entire childhood that white shoes were always the way to go. I’ve also been thinking about where I want to take him and the family out to eat. It’s not easy.

If you’ve never had the chance to meet my pops, he’s a good man. He’s a good person and will always go out of his way to help another person in need. He’s the only Hispanic man I know that would help the police stop a man running away from them and just leave right after. He’s the only person I know that will take the bus instead of asking for a ride from anybody else, knowing it’ll only cause us a 5-minute inconvenience. He’s the only person I know that would stop everything that he’s doing if you tell him you’re having an issue, and he doesn’t matter if it’s your issue or not.

To this day, I’ve always tried to make him proud. As far back as I can remember, that was the guy that I always wanted to try and impress. If he lost something, I wanted to be the one to find it so that he could be surprised by me. He saw me type one time, and he thought I was fast, so I practiced some more on “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing” just to make sure I was ready for the next time I needed help.

Growing up, I always thought that my dad knew everything, and if he didn’t, there just must not be an answer to it. I trusted my dad’s so much that if he didn’t put me on to something, I would assume that it wasn’t the cool thing to do. I was so confident that my dad was the jack of all trades; he knew how to do EVERYTHING. To this day, I think that’s true. He might not know everything, but he knows a little about just about anything, and he can keep a conversation going with it. He’s a quiet man, he doesn’t share much of what he’s gone through in his life, but when he does, he can have your mind wandering for hours about what he said. Now that I’m older, I think that’s what I could have used; more of my dad talking about his experiences that he may not be proud of going through. I guess I never thought of it before, but my dad made mistakes just like any other kid, except nobody was around to check him when he was a kid. My dad would get checked for doing too many things for others instead.

There are days where I wonder why I am the way that I am, and then I think of my pops, and I can’t shake the thought that I am what he would have been if he had a person like him as a father. Whether that’s good or bad, I’m not too sure, but I’m sure that I’m trying to do a little more good than bad.