My daddy has been a waiter my entire life. I have never once been ashamed of that, or felt like my dad wasted his intelligence on something so small in the grand scheme of things. He's fucking amazing at what he does. Legitimately. There are bad waiters, there are waiters, there are exceptional waiters, and then there's my daddy. He really is the kind of person who could sell you your own shoes, and make you think paying him to take your shoes off just to put them back on was a brilliant idea. I've always envied that trait in him, because he's far better at schmoozing than I could ever hope to be.
I've always talked about my dad being brilliant and engaging and fantastic. I brag about my daddy whenever I have the chance. When my dad came to visit last year in May, I lent him my signed copy of The Future of the Mind (signed by the great Michio Kaku himself), because I knew he'd appreciate it. When he came again for the wedding, he gave it back to me, with our wedding gift in it. Additionally, he put some letters in it that he'd written. To NASA.
It reads:
Gentleman,
First of all, I cannot, in words, express my feelings of horror, disappointment, and loss over the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and the death of its seven member crew. January 28th, 1980 will burn forever in my memory as the most tragic day in the history of America's space program. I pray that it was the last such accident. However, in my opinion, the Challenger incident, obviously a setback, will not defeat America's manned exploration of space. This belief is the reason I am writing this letter. I wish to participate in the future space program. I want to be an astronaut. I dream of the day when I can become part of the NASA team.
I don't know what he wrote next, or if he ended up sending a cleaned up version of this. For some reason, I haven't asked my dad about it. I think I want to just imagine about it, and love my daddy for seeing the Challenger explode and instantly going, "I CAN USE THIS TO MY ADVANTAGE."
So that's kind of a brief introduction to the most wonderful man alive.
He used to work at a place in south Florida called Marina Bay. It was a nice restaurant, but my memory of it is from my six year old brain. I think I remember it being nice because it had two stories, and also I could feed the koi fish in the front of the restaurant. My dad has never really worked anywhere low rent, so I feel fairly confident that Marina Bay was as nice as I remember.
One of the benefits of my dad working at restaurant was being able to eat at said restaurants whenever I wanted. On one such occasion of enjoying food benefits off of the back of my father's hard work, there was someone playing piano. I had been sitting and eating my dinner with my mom, listening to this fellow play his piano. Something came over me, and I told my mom, "I want to go sing." And then I got up and found my daddy, and told him the same thing. My dad told me to wait, so I waited until the man playing piano was in between songs, and I asked him if I could sing a song with him. He said I could.
He introduced me to the crowd (did I mention this was a two story restaurant? That was at full capacity?), and then he played Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and I sang it. I remember standing up there, with everybody watching me, and feeling like a star. It went directly to my head when everybody stood up and applauded me, and it went even MORE to my head when people came up to my table and said nice things to me, and said even nicer things about me to my mom and dad all night. I was a fucking sensation!
The moral of this story? I peaked at the age of six.
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