I was adopted from birth. I don’t know my biological father. Whoever he is, he has never been interested in having a relationship with me. But my real father—the man who chose to raise me—I knew him, and these thoughts are for him.My father was born on a Friday, October 6, 1922, in the one horse town of Deer Trail, about 53 miles east of Denver in Arapaho County, Colorado. He was named Robert Thurman Sharp, but to everyone in the world I knew he was just Bob. As I understand it, his parents lived for a time in Oklahoma and Arkansas (where he picked up the drawl that infected me as a kid) before they settled down on a farm just outside Ottumwa, Iowa.He was a child of the Great Plains, a child of the Great Depression, a child of the Dust Bowl. He had an 8th Grade education and a talent for operating heavy equipment that, along with farm life, he spent the better part of his youth trying to walk away from. He was 19 years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and within the week he enlisted to fight in WWII. In an attempt to get as far away from Iowa and tractors as he could he joined the Navy and hoped to be a battleship gunner. He was at the top of his training group when a physical revealed he was color blind which at the time disqualified him from operating artillery. So my father was reluctantly transferred to the Sea Bees (the newly formed Naval Construction Battalion) to serve his country half way around the world, sitting on a tractor, plowing jungles into airstrips in the South Pacific. After the war he did all he could to not return to Iowa, and ended up married and operating heavy equipment in Long Beach, California. By the time I showed up he was running Scholl Canyon Landfill for the Los Angeles County Sanitation District.My father was a quiet, soft-spoken man. He would never have called himself a leader but he was so capable and dependable and so good to the people around him, that they kept putting him in positions of leadership because they trusted him—whatever the task—to get it done. He was tough as nails. So tough and strong, I thought his hands were made of iron. Yet, he never handled anyone with an iron hand. My father was a big dog who never acted big. An alpha who hardly ever growled or barked. And when he did, it shook me to my core.He taught me how to build a fire. How to care for animals. How to shoot. How to fish. How to swim. How to dribble a basketball, throw a football, and hit a baseball. He taught me how to use tools, how embrace back breaking work, how to shut up and get the job done, and of course … how to drive a tractor. Mostly, my father taught me, purely by example, how to be decent and kind. Two things that, after decades of searching for “the Truth” in this world, I have come to embrace as the two most important things a human being can ever hope to be. My father always wanted me to be better than him. “You’re cut from a different cloth than me,” he would say. “You’re a lot smarter. You shouldn’t be like me. You can be anything you choose to be.” I was in some ways cut from a different cloth and there was a whole lot about me that, honestly, my father didn’t understand. But the thing is, he was so decent and humble and kind that he never let not understanding me get in the way of loving and supporting me.If he made one parenting mistake it was taking a job away from home when I was in my teens. I didn’t know it so much at the time but really needed him then, and he wasn’t there to help me avoid some decisions that would stay with me for years and years. But, in the end, I never doubted his love. I never doubted how proud he was of me. And in the end I hope to God he was wrong about me not being cut from the same cloth as him. Because my father was a decent and kind man. And after all my own wandering and searching, all my attempts to do better than my dad, I have come to the conclusion that all I ever want to be is decent and kind, just like my dad.Fatherhood is tough. So tough,...