Elizabeth's Remarks

My dad was such an example to me. I always wanted to be just like him. When I was little he would get up every Saturday morning at like 7 in the morning and go work in our garden. I was usually the only one awake and as soon as I would hear him get up I would jump up and throw on my little pair of overalls, just so that I would be matching him, and chase after him to help him in the garden. Honestly, I probably got in the way more than I helped but he always would hand me a handful of seeds and show me how to put them in the holes he dug, or we would eat the fresh peas and see how far we could throw the pea pods. We had this huge patch of strawberries that took up half of our garden and every summer we would go out and pick them and then go into the house and make pancakes with the whole family. Then we would cut up the strawberries and eat them on the pancakes.

He was always doing these super funny pranks on people. One time when I was like 8 I was at my friends house and he showed up to pick me up dressed up as this major hippie. He had a wig on and had pulled it back into a ponytail and them he put on a fake goatee and mustache. He had peace earrings on and a leather jacket and ripped jeans. I walked into the room, took one look at him and walked right back out. The thought that kept running through my mind was “A drug dealer is here to kidnap me.

My dad was always doing funny things. Every Valentines day he would find some other crazy place to take my mom so that they would be away from their eight crazy kids. They would have candle light dinners everywhere from his office to our motorhome. He would always take all day setting it up and he wouldn’t tell my mom where it was so that it would be a surprise. My mom and dad were so adorable together. If you wanted a definition of true love you could basically just look at them. He would get up every morning to go running and he would always leave little notes on her mirror on sticky notes or written in lipstick that said “I love you”. We would all be sitting in a room doing something and he would randomly start talking about how beautiful he thought my mom was and how much he loved her. I always thought that was normal but as I got older I realized how much my parents loved each other wasn’t normal. We have this one video of us in Mexico at a taco stand and my brother asked my dad if he wanted to say something to posterity and the he immediately said “I love your mother.” My brother was then like “Do you have anything taco related to say?” and he was like “That I love to eat tacos with your mother that I love” Now I don’t know if you know this about my family but if you want to eat tacos with someone, you must love them alot. That was basically how my dad was all of the time. Almost everything he did was about how much he loved my mom. With everything sometimes it’s easy to feel sorry for yourself but then I just think “Man Elizabeth you are so lucky that your parents love each other and made covenants so that your family can be together forever.”