Houston, we have a problem...Life on Mars looks eerily familiar.

(Atticus and Scout Finch, from To Kill a Mockingbird, the BEST book/movie ever in existence....seriously.)

Although I know it is now past Independence Day, and I therefore should be posting about history and our nation (that will come, never fear), I still have yet to post about Father's Day.  Let me just say, my mama is my best friend, but I think I'll always still be a Daddy's girl.  Plain and simple.  I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time and finding Atticus a very familiar character.  I'm not sure how he managed it, but my father was quite a bit like Atticus in that he did not expect my sister and I to behave like adults, but neither did he treat us like children, if that makes any sense.  It's one thing I've learned to appreciate very much as I've grown older.  However, there have been some amusing incidents between my father and I during those transitional years; I suppose it is just inevitable that parents will invariably revert to 'parenthood' no matter the number of years you've long since stopped wearing pigtails.  We were sitting around the dinner table one evening, my mother, father and I.  I was saying something to my mother, apparently in a very animated fashion, and, being my mother's daughter, I was using hand gestures to accentuate my statements.  Not "You'll shoot your eye out!" style gestures, just vague waves of the hand.  My father watches me for a moment, reaches across the dinner table, takes the fork out of my unresisting-due-to-shock grip, places it on the table and explains simply, "You'll hurt yourself."  The 'amusing' point of this story?  I was a full time college student managing a job at the public library and another at the college, two time-consuming jobs at church, and a few minor photography jobs on the side. This memory relapse is apparently common at some point to all fathers, as so deftly illustrated by this scene from "Father of the Bride."

It is common also, however, for daughters always to remain their father's daughter.  For some reason, I'm always more pleased when I can make my father smile than anyone else; it's always been that way, I suppose.  A couple of months ago I was sitting in the breakfast room in a hotel in Illinois and overheard a few words of the conversation next to me.  Two women were discussing 'Take Your Child to Work Day,' and how fun it was to pack a lunch for two and eat in the office.  I had to smile because it was so different from the lunches my sister and I shared with our father on those days.  My father is third generation lumber man, and so we grew up out of doors.  I think we stayed filthy as often as we stayed clean, and enjoyed every minute until we discovered it was considered 'work.'  We tromped through dense thickets of briars, slogged through marshy swamps, came home smelling of gasoline, machine oil and tree sap and covered in insect bites.  It was a great way to grow up.  It's why I became a librarian.  Anyway, every morning before we headed out, our father would give us the lecture: don't get around the machinery-they can't see/hear you and could easily accidentally slice you into deli meat, don't distract the workers and if a tree starts to fall, run like hell.  (Sorry for the language. And no, my father never swore in front of us, but that was the general idea, trust me; we could understand that even at that tender age.)  For lunch we would stop in the convenience store and get Lance crackers and a soda, drop the tailgate and feast.  It was glorious. 
My obssession with history began while listening to my father's stories of his father during the war, and his own experiences growing up during the tumultuous years after that horrendous event.  One story from my own childhood is one that only in the years succeeding has become amusing.  Growing up, I had nearly every orthodontic device contrived by man.  I once tripped the metal detector at the airport.  True story.  Anyway, one day, when I was in fourth grade, all of the bottom brackets of my braces, excluding the two on the molars, popped off, leaving the wire free.  It immediately hooked itself around the brackets on the top row of teeth, creating a synthetic form of lock-jaw.  Well, here's a pretty pickle.  I finally conveyed my emergency (in a non-vocal manner) to the teacher who immediately marched me to the front office and phoned my father.  What transpired afterwards, in the way of phone calls to the orthodontist I have no idea-my part in it picks up when my father actually arrived, in person, in the school's front office.  With a pair of newly acquired nail clippers soaking in alcohol.  I was instructed to lie down on the couch, like a shrink patient, which, trusting in my father's superior judgement, I did.  He then proceeded to do emergency orthodontic work in the head office, clipping the thin wire with the clippers and telling me to 'go back to class, we'd get more brackets put on tomorrow.'  Kid you not, you can't make this kind of stuff up, trust me.  Isn't it always nice to have inventive minds around to handle the unexpected?
There are hundreds of other stories about my dad I could share, but I suppose I'll wrap up by saying that Father's Day or any other day, I'll always love my Atticus dearly, no matter how old I get.