Something I noticed about my father, growing up,

was that, having made up his mind about something, and having publicly expressed his opinion on the matter, he didn't rest there. He checked his opinions against experience, and checked them again.

You know I think Dad was the greatest country singer ever, but Dad watched Austin City Limits, listened to Cole Porter and played the rock stations when he was driving me somewhere.

And Dad was an engineer and a teacher of engineers.

He never intentionally taught me any of it, except when I was four or five and I crawled up on his lap and asked him to read me a story while he was studying one of his books and he read it aloud to me. That was when I asked him what something meant and he spent a half hour drawing me pictures and explaining how refrigeration works.

I know how refrigeration works. Dad could teach.

Two of the most formative experiences of my life happened when we went to pick up Dad from work and Mom told me to go in and get him. The ... btw, the one I just related is probably the first, other than the repeated experience of diving in front of the amp whenever Dad set it up to sing, but those experiences screw up the numbering system I just created.

Anyway, the first was going in to the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association (MEBA, that's the union) school in Duluth to get Dad, who was teaching marine engineers what they needed to know to move up a grade - Dad was at the top, a Chief Engineer. I stood outside the open classroom door and watched Dad writing incomprehensible thing on a chalkboard and explain them to grown men - and not effiminate men either. Union men. Rough-hewn men. Tough guys. And they were listening and writing down what he said. That was an image that recurred to me throughout my education. The message I got was that learning was about real things. That real people used in real life.

OK, now that I've started thinking about formative experiences, my mind is going nuts about all these other memories, but one especially important one of the others that involves Dad is watching him make, from raw steel stock, a part for a generator that was broken when I took my trip with him on "the boat" as a fourteen-year-old. He let me mind the lathe for a while, as it was cutting the threads, but he and the Second Assistant Engineer did all the heating and bending. I wish I could remember the Second Assistant's name; Dad obviously considered him the brightest light on the boat. That was the SS McGonigal, 1977, Kinsman Marine Transit, owned by Henry Steinbrenner, father of George. Just in case the guy wants to tell me who he is.

The other time Ma sent me to get Dad was at the 'stone (limestone) dock in Superior. We'd driven in to pick him up and he wasn't waiting for us. Growing up, that had always been her job to go and get him. I guess, now that I was a seventeen-year-old superjock, it was logical for the job to devolve to me. I mean, the first thing to do was climb a 20-foot, rickety ladder, after all.

So I did the natural, superjock, monkey impersonation up the ladder and set about impersonating Sherlock Holmes to find Dad. I didn't look in the Chief's quarters, because whatever he would have needed to do there wouldn't have interfered with him communicating with us in some way. So I headed down to the engine room. It took a little searching, but finally I found him wrestling mightily with a water pump.

And when I say wrestling mightily, I'm not exaggerating one whit. I asked if there was something I could do to help, and he told me to hold this 90 pound chunk of steel steady - at arms length in front of me - for an operation that took about 25 minutes.

Thank God I really was a superjock at the time.

When I got to him, he was pouring sweat. By the time we were done, we were both pouring sweat. My front delts had died the death of a thousand cuts.

But it was really done, and it was really a good job.

I watched Dad care for those parts like ailing loved ones...

And we could both face Mom with pride.