The sky's the limit.

Tell me something about your dad.

I remember going on errands with him; to the gas station to fill up the car on Sunday afternoons, to buy a cardboard box full of lightbulbs from a warehouse in the city, to Sears automotive to get new tires installed on the Chevrolet Cavalier, to the retail plaza with the glass store-front thick-with-cigarette-smoky camera store counter, and to Brand Names where you used a half-size pencil to write a part number on a quarter sized sheet of paper before you dropped it in the in-basket and waited for your name to be called.

I remember going to work with dad when he had to go in on a Saturday. To Calspan where I was introduced to a tick-tack-toe game played against the computer printed on a green and white striped pin-fed continuous printer at each turn; to M&T Bank were the underpass near the office had its signal horizontally situated instead of vertical because the airport tunnel's limited visibility required it, only that dad couldn't decipher if it was green or red (that was always the case, he reported, but when vertical the location of the illuminated light was sufficient information; the signal on its side required knowing if it was laying to the left or to the right, so we would often stop at green lights). And to Fisher Price toys where the air conditioned false floor supported large computer tape storage drives, where a missing floor tile would allow my little body to sneak through to explore the underneath.

I remember shoveling the driveway with him. It was a lot of work because we received a lot of snow near Buffalo, and I learned how to lean on my shovel like him when taking a break. I recall mowing the lawn with him, emptying the catcher, and weeding the gardens that were designed in the shape of my mother’s initials long before I was conceived. And I remember pool maintenance as part of our summer weekend chores, testing the chlorine level and replacing the white powder in the vacuum filter; skimming the leaves off the surface of the water, and tapping the long extension pole in the stones to release the wet floating detritus from our net.

I remember learning to drive with him in the manual 4-speed Ford Fiesta, stalling the car at the stop sign right in front of the house on Cottonwood. We had winter tires way back then, a ritual I barely recall, but I remember swapping them out in the driveway before the snow arrived in the fall.

I remember being dropped off at college for the first time. We together collected the required textbooks from the stacks at the campus bookstore, choosing used ones when available, and I remember going to the nearby Gary-Wheaton Bank to open my first checking account. It was a custodial account that offered ATM access from an on-campus kiosk in the foyer below the registrar's office. I often withdrew $5 at a time. My dad's name remained on my bank account well into my 40s.

I remember sitting with my dad in an unfamiliar office, perhaps the dean's office on the first day of freshman orientation, selecting a campus job that would provide a little cash to spend those four years of undergrad. I remember receiving the Amherst Bee, a weekly local community paper from my hometown, in my CPO box. And I remember letting dad know in the spring that it was no longer necessary to pay for a second subscription.

I remember wrapping all dad's furniture in cellophane in his apartment on Sheridan Road before movers collected his things for his relocation to his retirement job in Waxhaw. And I remember learning about the unusual new chores required of a homeowner in North Carolina. We had to keep the well lines from freezing in the winter with the warmth of a lightbulb under an overturned plastic garbage can, and replace the whole house water filter in the basement, clean the gutters from a fully extended extension ladder, and to maintain and sometimes pump the septic tank. We purchased pine needles to cover the garden beds instead of black mulch, and we bought monkey grass plants at the nursery. There was lots of raking of leaves to do in the fall. There were unusual bugs in the basement.

I remember the delight in my dad’s telling of finding a notation in my grandfather’s Bible of membership in the Presbyterian Church, which allowed his widowed mother after my grandpa’s death to move in the Presbyterian Home near her home.

And I remember my dad carrying a 3 by 5 card in his breast pocket, always, that had my name and phone number on it in case of emergency. It was used more than once; once when he had a head on collision on a narrow bridge on his commute in Waxhaw, and once when chest pains turned into heart surgery where he had stents inserted at the larger hospital an hour’s drive from home.

And I remember shouting loudly in the middle of the street on August 21, 2018 at Madison and Clark when my mom called me with the news.