I've made it my business to observe fathers and daughters. And I've seen some incredible, beautiful things. Like the little girl who's not very cute – her teeth are funny, and her hair doesn't grow right, and she's got on thick glasses – but her father holds her hand and walks with her like she's a tiny angel that no one can touch.
Her dad must have gone back in time and done something to the robot dog to make it do silly things instead of what it was supposed to do. He must have done it on purpose, to make the scientists and the man with the moustache look stupid! What a clever man her dad was.
I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.
He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
He called me Dad', he whispered croakily into the darkness. 'He called me Dad.' And, although he felt overwhelmed with happiness the tears ran silently down his face.
There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself.
My dear young fellow,' the Old-Green-Grasshopper said gently, 'there are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven't started wondering about yet.'
I can’t remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face, the flames of discipline he raised above my head.
What I have been trying so hard to tell you all along is simply that my father, without the slightest doubt, was the most marvellous and exciting father any boy ever had.
Being a dad is quite rewarding and even magical at times. It is our greatest chance to do something right in our lives that will keep making the world a brighter place even generations after we are gone.
I'm sure Dad would dismantle my game system if he could figure out how to do it. But luckily, the people who make these things make them parent-proof.
Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for their father’s mistakes.