If If's Not One Thing, It's Your Father

My father was a very smart man, probably the smartest man I have ever known. Quick sense of humor, biting wit.

I look like him but otherwise I have few of his better qualities and most of his worst. Unfortunately, I have to own the smart mouth, among others.

Daddy was a left-brain guy, analytical, logical, mathematically inclined. He could do mathematical calculations in his mind that I would have to use pencil and paper (pre-calculator, of course1) to do. He had all kinds of little tricks, like rounding up and down and estimating, and bam, bam, shazam he had the number. Me, not so much.

I'm pretty right-brain. I can write an essay and share my feelings all day. I can talk the paint off a wall and make friends with a tree stump.  The stump will end up telling me about the year of the drought that caused that funky ring and the time the tree-borers tried to invade. Maybe even about the pain of the final chain saw. In short, I'm all about the emotions. 

This caused some issues in my childhood when there was schoolwork involved. When I had to retake Algebra I in summer school one year you would have thought that Mars had just crashed into Earth. Apparently I was every kind of dumb if not actually stupid. Turned out that once I got the right teacher, it all made sense to me . (My Algebra teacher was a left-brain too and hopelessly unable to explain to us righters.)  I loved Geometry because of the symmetry of the proofs. Okay, I was never going to be a mathematician but I was capable of something more than simple addition and if you needed someone to do long division for you, I was your girl! 

For me, long division was the mathematical version of diagramming a sentence. Does anyone diagram sentences any more? I could definitely use some sentence diagramming as I try to learn Spanish! All those competing verbs!!

So as I've grown older, and I've now lived more years than he did, I've always regretted that I don't have more of his skills. I often think of him and wish I could tell him about some new invention or situation to get his opinion. 

On the right-brain side, Daddy loved crossword puzzles. No, not the London Times puzzles but the ones in The Washington Post and The New York Times. The Sunday puzzles were his favorites, needless to say. I wish he was here to compete in the Post's Neologism contests or to invent captions for The New Yorker. He would have loved Wordle, especially the versions that involve multiple words. And he loved mysteries, especially the old British locked-room-in-the-stately-house ones by John Dickson Carr and Ngaio Marsh. By the time I was eight, I was a fan too, and I can still lose myself in a Peter Wimsey novel in which the solution to the crime revolves around something as arcane as the incorrect pattern of a bunch of church bells.

What brings all this up is that I've been searching all my life for a man as smart as my dad. And just recently I figured out that, as Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

I am my father, after all. 

There's nothing I like better than a good Sudoku. My father would have loved Sudoku, and might even have been designing them by now. I'm a word puzzle nut. And knitting a piece of intricate lace, and seeing the pattern emerge from a chart full of unfamiliar symbols is sheer joy. Putting words together in an essay or in a novel involves some mathematical precision too. There's an order for everything. And the geometry of English Paper Piecing!

My father is alive in me, every day. And I have a little more control over my sarcasm and bitter humor than he did, most days.

By the way, for those of you wondering about the tinking of the shawl, I'm happy to say that problem is resolved and I'm moving deliberately through Clue 2.  Still three clues behind but slow and steady goes the tortoise.