Finding Momentum

There’s some­thing I miss about being with my dad.

I have mem­o­ries of just sit­ting in his lap waaaay back when I was a wee lad (haha). There was that secu­rity of know­ing his love for me. There was that antic­i­pa­tion of one day grow­ing up and being like him. Now, 15 years in the future, I think I get it.

My dad and I took a trip to the Big Sur coast­line yes­ter­day to hang out for the after­noon. We rem­i­nisced on how we used to take weekly fam­ily trips to the sea. “It was really fun then,” he says, “and we could go so often; you guys didn’t have a choice but to come along.”

Dri­ving High­way 1 is a lit­tle dan­ger­ous, because most dri­vers spend half their time look­ing at the expan­sive sea instead of the lane mark­ers. The sea, yes­ter­day, was par­tic­u­larly impres­sive (so I was a lit­tle nervous).

“Remem­ber when we went shop­ping for our first van?” I ask him. I was car-crazy in the third grade. I had picked out the per­fect van, a top-of-the-line Nis­san Quest with all the trim­mings. It was also about six thou­sand dol­lars above our bud­get. My dad ended up buy­ing a bottom-of-the-line Mer­cury Vil­lager with zero options, save for the air con­di­tion­ing. (“We don’t need all those options,” he would remind me. “You only waste money if you’re rich… and stupid.”)

My dad smiled and nod­ded. “That made a big impact on me,” I tell him. Even though my third-grade heart was crushed, he’d taught me to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between a want and a need.

My dad grew up poor. “We didn’t feel poor,” he tells me, “I was really happy.” I grew up hear­ing his sto­ries about how he used to make his own tools and toys from sticks and rub­ber bands.

“I remem­ber one day my dad gave me [the Tai­wanese equiv­a­lent of] 25 cents to buy candy,” he tells me with a grin. “That taught me grace. I got some­thing I didn’t deserve.” He smiles as he remem­bers. “It really made a big impact on me; I still remem­ber it today.”

My grand­fa­ther is a kind man, but he wasn’t always like that. “I’m really proud of my daddy,” my dad tells me. “He used to have a tem­per, work­ing away in a for­eign coun­try for all those years. But as he grew older, he became kinder; he had more joy.”

I point out how strange it is to have indi­rectly received a bit of Yieh Yieh through him. “It’s called a legacy,” he tells me, and we all leave one behind.

Even though we grow up and we get busy, even though con­ver­sa­tions are stilled and chances are missed, I find this time with my dad more than enough to make up for time lost.

We twist and turn through the high­way, gap­ing at the coast, but never stray­ing too far from who we are and what we leave behind.