Sunsets and Daddies

The sunset is rather beautiful tonight. Of course, I'm in my office, but my office has a view of Lake Erie (and Cleveland Browns Stadium). The sun is red/orange and it's dipping into Lake Erie right now. The sky closest to the water is red with bright orange flames through the clouds, which are the color of the water. It's stunning, and I wish you all could see it.

One of my favorite commericals remains a Lifesavers commerical from my childhood. It is, a father and a little girl are watching the sun set. The father is whispering to his daughter, "Going....Going....Gone." The little girl whirls back around and says to her father, "Do it again, Daddy." That chokes me up. She really thought that her father could walk on water and commend the sun to rise and set once again. Daddies, of course, can do anything.

This leads me to another thought. It occurs to me that I am a disappointment to my father. Not that he doesn't love me, because I know that he does. It's just, when he envisioned his oldest child at age 28, I know that he thought that she would be more like him. He gets frustrated that I don't care about public opinion and designer labels (HOW many times have I heard: "Stephanie, you can tell a designer shirt from a cheap shirt from a mile away, and you shouldn't be wearing junk") and my politics differ incredibly from his (he's called me a communist before) or any of that stuff. Not that my father is materialistic, by the way, he's just more practical in the things that people care about. And I'm definitely not practical. Sometimes, when I'm talking to him, he'll just stop listening. And I can sense him doing it, the same way you can sense when it's about to storm, but how does one respond? So I'll pretend that I don't notice and continue talking, and when I have to tell him a story or a friend's name for the nine hundredth time, I just pretend that it doesn't bother me. However, my father can still walk on water...long as it's frozen.