my dad the discoverer

my dad always loved to discover new things everywhere he lived or traveled. i remember him visiting me in the Bay Area, where he would find restaurants and stores that i didn't even know about after living there for 4 years. he must have tried every single chinese restaurant in the neighborhood and knew which ones were the good ones, which were bad, which had nice waiters, which had nice decor.

on top of discovering stores and restaurants, he always somehow found a way to become friends with the random people that he met, even after only being in the town for a month. the owner of the restaurants would know him, of course the nurses at the dialysis center loved him, the old man who hung out at the park was friends with him, the people who worked at the bank called him by name too. it was so amusing to walk into a store and have people know who he was.

he was so happy just wandering around where-ever he happened to be, whether it be a big city or small suburb (even if it was a farm town in Kansas, i'm sure he would make friends!) and discover new stores, restaurant and people. and then he would come home and tell me and my mom (who were probably just waking up) about all the things he found and take us to the good places. now i guess we will need to discover things for ourselves...

our love of sleep

my dad always woke up a lot earlier than me or my mom. especially my mom, who likes to stay up late and then sleep until the afternoon. i remember he used to make fun of my mom and say that if he never woke her up, she would sleep until who-knows-when. he used to tell me how sometimes he would experiment and see what her "natural wake-up" time was, and she would sleep past breakfast, lunch and almost dinner.

i was missing my dad's concept of "natural wake-up" time this weekend, when i tried to use it to catch up on sleep lost from the past few busy months. i miss my dad waking me up on the weekends (actually, he woke me up on the weekdays for school too).