At some point today, my daughter will call me…

And Cassaundra will wish me a happy Father’s Day.  And I’ll thank her, and tell her I hope to see her later this year, maybe in October.  We’ll talk about a few things, and then we go back to our respective lives.

Believe me, it wasn’t always that easy.  I’ve said before about how I didn’t view myself as the best father she could have had.  That I made plenty of mistakes and didn’t read the “how to be a daddy” manual that every other father was supposed to receive.  All I knew was that I did the best I could with the resources that I had.  Cassaundra turned out pretty well, so if nothing else I did better than I would have hoped.

Sometimes, though, there are moments when I can say that I am my daughter’s father.  Or that she’s picked up a lot of me in herself.

Case in point.

Cassaundra and I used to watch lots of silent movies together – mostly the works of Chaplin and Keaton, although I do have a copy of Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last somewhere in the house.

A month or so ago, she called me because she was angry at something at a local bar.

“Dad,” she snarled, “They have this movie bar in Seattle and they play old movies.  Dad, they played Buster Keaton’s The General and they played the edited version, not the real one you and I used to watch!”

Yep.  Case in point.

This is a girl who, if you ask her to fill in the blank with the first words being “Pirates Of…” she would not respond “the Carribean.”  She would most likely respond “Dark Water.”

This is a girl who learned the fine art of making Hulaburgers and Spam Stroganoff and other scrape-together meals because she saw her dad making them.

This is a girl who volunteered at the Whiskers cat shelter in order to get something on a job resume, because she knew that her father worked hard to take care of her, and with that she would learn that hard work reaps its own rewards.  Heck, before long she had three different part-time jobs at Crossgates – she was working at Häagen-Dazs, Hot Dog Charlie’s and Spencer Gifts.  There’s a mixture of work experience right there – ice cream, hot dogs and South Park figurines.

Oh wait… I did get something in my e-mail this morning from Cassaundra.

I got this.

Thanks, Cassaundra. Love you too.

Oh, and thanks for the subscription to Popular Photography.  I really appreciate that.