Remembering Dad by Bret

For those of you who don’t know, last year I was fortunate enough to go on a 10 day cruise with my dad through the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. We stopped in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Poland and Germany. I kept a journal while we were on the trip. I’d like to read something from it. We were in Copenhagen and we’d been walking all day.

“We went into the central train station to use the restroom. It was an enormous building with an expansive, glass paned ceiling. Afterward we sat on a stone bench to rest our feet and people watch. Dad noticed there were a number of pigeons inside the enclosed train station. We talked about how they had everything they needed right there. They had food, water and shelter. Dad wondered if there were any pigeons that were born in the station and lived their entire lives there, totally unaware of the world outside. Like people who never leave the cities they were born in.”

I think this gives a good sense of who he was. He had a unique way of looking at things. He could take an ordinary event and make it into something extraordinary. He viewed the world with a childlike sense of joy and wonder. The world was a better place with him in it.