Do I Look Enough Like Felshaw King?

On Fathers Day,  I got to spotlight my dad in a church (Primary) singing activity.  We have different shirts for the kids to see, we give clues, and the kids guess which dad or grandpa the shirt belongs to.  Last year, Scott offered a pink and yellow paisley button-down.  Nobody had any trouble guessing that it was Brother Dopp's shirt.  Very few men are macho enough to pull off paisley.

This year, I went with my dad to his closet to look for the perfect shirt.  He went straight past the idea of dress shirts and casual wear to his shelf labeled "Running."  I spotted one of my favorite shirts, a race shirt from the Baer Gutsman (here are pictures), a grueling race that goes straight up, then straight down a local mountain.  My dad ran that race every year.  When we pulled out the faded blue shirt, it was clean and washed, but it still had a race number pinned to it, from a different race years later.  I could not have chosen a more perfect shirt to represent my dad, and he has a lot of good shirts.  He is known as an impeccable dresser.  Just last night at a wedding, a neighbor was wearing a linen shirt and dress pants.  He told me that he asked his wife as he dressed, "Do I look enough like Felshaw King?"  My dad shines his shoes every day, but he looks equally good in his old running shirts.

My brothers and I used to sleep in Dad's running shirts.  It was part of our ritual, after our baths, to go to Dad's armoire and select "one of Dad's running shirts" to wear to bed.  He had dozens of them, and we each had our favorites.  My favorites were definitely the Baer Gutsman shirts because  I knew it was a hard race.

In church as I gave the kids the clues about my dad, I painted a picture of a man any child would do well to emulate.  I said his favorite things are his family and his profession.  He is proud of and devoted to both.  he likes to run, exercise and read.  He loves to crack open a book or look something up online to get an answer to a discussion question.  He will sometimes bring pages of information that he has printed up to one of the kids, regarding a conversation they may have had days earlier.  Just being around my dad makes you smarter.  I wish being around him made me more athletic, but - alas! - his running gene skipped me.  I did learn from Dad's love of running the discipline he has for it, and I try to apply that in other areas of my life.  I observed Dad putting in the hours, logging his miles in his running book, watching his diet, never missing a day, and I learned that only then, after giving his best, did he reap the benefits of his efforts.

Thanks, Dad, for teaching me through example.  I bet you didn't even realize I was watching.  Or maybe you did.  In any case, I was watching, I am watching, and like our neighbor, I ask myself, "Do I look enough like Felshaw King?"  Not only in dress, but in character.