And My Brilliant Father.

And because Father's Day is coming up and Dad’s recent move into an independent living community is why we're rifling through Mom's old files, I’ll brag on my father now.

We never did quite know what my father did at work. Something to do with electronics, then later computers. He’d say he worked with machines, and I seem to remember that once he or Mom referred to him as a “design engineer.” What we did know is that if you needed to accomplish a task but couldn’t figure out how to do it, he’d crack the code, he’d make a device or contraption, he’d find a way. That’s how his mind worked, which as you can imagine makes this time of his life when he’s losing his visual and manual and mental acuity extremely frustrating for him. (I am like him in many ways, but not this one.)

He invented this machine. I have no clue what it does, but it must be something important because they patented it.