With family, it's always maybe; never no

NOTE: this is a rough draft, but I would still welcome feedback. I am not super-sensitive.

Do you ever wonder who had the greatest influence on your life, or if you would recognize that person when you met them, and so on?

I don't: it was my dad. Yes, it's corny, but I'm partial to sentimentality at times.

My father - a smallish, handsome man with curly brown hair, a reluctant yet engaging smile, a strangely nerdy sense of humor, and a metabolism that anyone would envy - earned his doctorate in musical composition by the time he was not much older than I am now.

Sources indicate that even as a child he was serious, reserved and very smart. Lefthanded, also, not that puritanical theory applies to that anymore. Still, he's just a little different than most people. Thank the Lord for that, I think.

He and my mom almost couldn't be more different.

She, an outgoing, compassionate and opinionated Capricorn who had a quick temper but could make a cheesecake that would make you question your religion; he a quiet musician and math and science genius (and computers) who unconvincingly asserts to this day that the drug movement of the 1970s passed him by. Also a Capricorn, my dad, though on the December end of it.

As a painfully shy child with more than healthy obsession with books, and an awkward phase that lasted until about age 14; I always identified somewhat with him.

I remember spending hours trying to dream up questions that would stump him.

It probably still is my greatest life goal - ask my dad something he can't answer.

Our discussions would range from time travel, why nutrition is important and why math is an immutable constant in life, to why cars work and how computers don't run on magic.

Why do we pray, I would ask? What does Jesus look like? Why can't there be a trinity of forms of the God discussed in the bible? Did people really live to be 900 years old? Why did people used to marry their close relatives? Did miracles really happen? What is a "concubine"? Why did Abraham have a child with his servant?

And so on. All of that stuff is in the currently translated version of the bible, if you can believe it. I know because I set out to "figure out" religion at about age eight.

Wasn't I just the little born journalist? How adorable. I maintain that all of those questions were and are valid now.

I was especially concerned with the existence of dinosaurs - my little heart just couldn't take it if they didn't exist. I knew that from the ZooBooks we got. I think they forgot to indoctrinate them with a creationist view!! whoops.

The important thing is that with my dad, the answer was never "I don't have time for this", or "dad's busy" or "that's not the right kind of question".

There was no question he couldn't answer. His whole big joke was that he looked it up in the "dad book".

Wish I had one of those now! Seriously, though; I didn't realize until I was much older that my dad is really freaking smart.

I still wonder where he learned all that stuff. I guess it just comes from being the kind of person who works day and night, and still found time to be the church worship leader every week and write some music on the side.

And go running every day, probably since birth, did I mention that? Seriously, to say that Dad runs "religiously"... well I just can't think of a stronger analogy for it.

He was the one who suggested I go into journalism at Texas State. Still not sure how that one turned out! Laughing out loud, ha ha.

He keeps telling me that like him, I should do "something else" and do writing in my free time.

Not all of us can be computer geniuses who just happened to catch the oil-well-imaging wave on the upshot in the late 70s and 80s, though.

If personalities and related skills could be divided into a continuous spectrum like light wave frequencies, mine would reside firmly down on the "red" or right-brained end where music (not the math part!!), art, writing, and "feelings" put down their hippy roots.

Dad would be precisely located at 0.5 wavelengths away from the "left" end - whatever that color is - where math and science and "logic" hold evil dominion.