WRITING PROMPT #60
Happy Daddy Day!
Looking back, he was just the father I needed
My father was a very smart man. Every morning before I left for school he asked me a simple question.
“What did you dream last night?”
And since I lived to please him, I trained myself to remember my nightly dreams to share with him.
He’s been gone for over 20 years now, but I still remember most of my dreams. While I don’t recall the details or even what the dreams are about sometimes, I remember the feeling and the mood, whether joyful, sexy, or sinister.
I didn’t realize then all that Daddy was teaching me with this question. It was just a fun game we played every morning.
Like our Tap game. We would sit side-by-side in the car or on the sofa while watching TV, and he would tap out a sequence of pats on my arm or knee. And then, I would have to match the sequence on his arm or knee. Some of them got pretty intricate. But that was the point.
I tended to drift off and get lost in daydreams while in school. Daddy devised the Tap game, I found out much later, to teach me how to tune out my thoughts and everything else and focus on the challenge in front of me, whether it’s the number of taps on my bony little knee or working out the…
