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I saw a really bad accident on my way home today and I thought of my Dad. No, not like that. It had just started raining and I saw that a car had flipped over on a exit ramp. The first thing that I thought of was something that my Dad always told me. He said that one of the most dangerous road conditions was just after it starts to rain. It's because the oil that collects and dries on the road during normal driving conditions starts to separate from the pavement and so you have a layer of oil on top of a layer water. As you can imagine, it can make for slippery driving.
My Dad was wacky like that. He was always throwing out little pearls of wisdom like that. The thing was that they didn't seem like bits of wisdom at the time that he said them. The wisdom only became clear once you experienced them out in the world.
Another thing that my Dad taught me, actually served to comfort me during the whole funeral arrangement thing. Working with the funeral director, we put together an obituary to run in the local papers. We gave the guy all the info that we wanted to be included and then the funeral director called it into the paper. My brother called me the next morning to tell me that the obituary was in the papers and everything was correct except they listed one of my Dad's former employers as General Motors instead of General Electric. He was kind of upset that they got something wrong about my Dad. But for me it was strangly comforting.
Because when I was a kid, my Dad told me that every time he had occasion to be mentioned in the paper for anything, there was always at least one mistake. It was usually a small error, but an error nonetheless. And he said that since there is always an error in a story that you know all the facts about, there is probably a small error in every story in the newspaper and when you read the newspaper, you should kept that in mind. And you know what? He was right. Whenever I happened to be in the paper - for baseball, football, a high school play, whatever - there was always something wrong in the story. Always. Usually it was something minor, but since I knew the whole story, I always noticed it. So when I read the paper, that's always in the back of my mind.
So when my brother told me about the error in the obituary, I kind of smiled. My Dad was right again.
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