A picture is worth a thousand words...

There was a framed picture of me on my Mother's desk at work. A co-worker was looking at it and told my Mom that I looked just like my Dad. She laughed.

"You think so?"

"Oh, definitely. You can tell that's Larry's son."

I love that story because Larry is, in the technical sense, my stepdad. In reality, he is the only real father I have ever had.

Just like most pre-teen kids, my relationship with my new father didn't go so well. It's not that I thought he was trying to replace my "real" father, because in truth, there was no "real" father to replace; the greasy yellow-toothed used-car salesman was never a father to begin with, just a sperm-donor. My relationship with Larry was tenuous simply because I suddenly had an authority figure in my life. We spent the better part of the next fifteen years battling, bumping heads, misunderstanding each other. In hindsight, I was the monster, not him, but at the time, I thought he was an unforgiving hard-ass.

Thank God he was.

Growing up with him, I found him to be anal-retentive, a perfectionist, and completely unbending in his ways. He had strange sayings, curses, and phrases. He was always taking showers.

But he found ways to make sure my sister and I always had a summer vacation, a tree-house to play in, a bedroom decorated to our tastes. There were sacrifices I was never aware of.

Our relationship eventually grew into one of respect as I got older, moved up the corporate ladder, settled down and got married. I can't remember exactly when I stopped calling him Larry and started calling him Dad. But that's what he always was, whether I was mature enough to admit it. And I was his son. So much so that I became my father.

My wife likes to joke that I snore like him, curse like him, eat like him, obsess over minute details like him. We have come to look like one another, our heads shorn close, our whiskers white, our noses always sunburned. I have become my father and I am the better man for it. And when I look at those pictures of my father and me, it is true, we do look alike. We should. He's my dad....