Speaking of good parents

(which is what I was doing in my post about Patrick Ness), a word about my Daddy.

Many of y’all already know how great my Mumsy is, because she is often lurking around the blogosphere, and because I talk about how she recommends me books, and because she sometimes guest-posts here. And I go on and on about Legal, Indie, and Social Sisters. But I don’t seem to talk about my father very much, which is weird because he is the best father in the world. In fact — this may be controversial but it is true — I’m going to go ahead and say he is a better father than Atticus Finch. That’s right! He just is this unstoppable force for good! He treats my beautiful mumsy and my sisters and me like gold. When I come home for Thanksgiving and Daddy drives to the airport very very late at night to pick me up, I will say, “Oh, Daddy, I’m sorry to keep you up so late,” and Daddy will say, “Jenny, there is nothing in the world I’d rather be doing than driving you home from the airport. I get to have a fun drive and visit with my beautiful daughter.” I can just tell y’all right now that it’s going to go down exactly like that, because that is the sort of thing Daddy says constantly. Last Christmas — he is very hard to shop for — I asked him what he wanted for Christmas and he said for Christmas he wanted me and him to go on some nice long walks around the lake and catch up and that would be the best Christmas gift I could give him.

When we have family holidays, Daddy sometimes makes as many as four different main courses, in order to accommodate the dietary restrictions of the various people attending. Also he can do everything. He brilliantly jerry-rigs the wondrously ancient car of Social Sister, which was mine until I moved to New York, in order to keep her on the road. He sews things. He built a possum trap and has caught like twelve possums to date. He rewired our whole house when I was little. He made Mumsy a beautiful kitchen table and a beautiful drop-leaf dining room table. He is the champion of programs and practice evaluation. In his youth, he taught himself how to play guitar, and he can listen to songs and figure out how to play them on his guitar just by listening to them. Y’all, because he can do everything. If he doesn’t know how to do something, he tries it anyway and usually succeeds.

When I was a small-size Jenny (and, okay, still sometimes now that I have grown up to grown-up size) and it was bedtime, sometimes Daddy would play his guitar and sing this song to us. He sings it better than Art Garfunkel. Obv.

The takeaway here is, my father is the best father ever made. Legal Sister, Indie Sister, Social Sister, and I are the luckiest girls in all the land. The end.

P.S. Okay, not quite the end. I just want to say, when I said that Daddy is hard to buy for and wants only love for Christmas, I do not want y’all to take that to mean that I’m not getting him a proper present for Christmas. Because I am. I have spent this entire year brainstorming proper gifts for Daddy for Christmas, and I rejoice to say I have come up with many. He’s going to get real presents for Christmas, and he’s going to like it.