This is my favorite photo of my father and me because it shows us in the middle of what we both loved to do: debate some issue, arcane or not, until the cows came home.
If you want to know why I always have something to say and, generally speaking, say it with conviction, you can blame my father. He trained me to argue rationally, to look at the logic of a position, and never to get mad. “When you get mad, you’ve lost the argument,” he insisted.
To say what I owe to my father would be to list just about everything about me. He died twenty years ago–wow!–and I miss him every day.
By the way, his response to this headline would be to snort, “Tender….” A sentimentalist he was not–although he was always the one who got tearful when I would leave home.
