The Last Dollar

Father’s Day

One dollar, that’s what I think of when I think of my dad. How much is a dad worth? Well, I have an exact answer for that.

I could start off by saying that all my life I have known the one person who would always protect me, even when my mom was mad at me, was my dad. I remember getting in trouble with my mom. My dad would stand up for me if the punishment was unjust. Even the day that I took my sisters car for a joy ride. He found out and yelled at me for a couple minutes and that was it. He threatened to tell my mom, but he never did. She didn't find out until I told her myself as an adult.

That’s what I remember. I remember my sister becoming a teenager before me, and her and my mom arguing all the time. My dad and I would seek refuge in the tv room, watching sci-fi silently.

That’s how I spent a lot of time after school when I was in high school. Playing games on the first computer we had. My mom worked evenings and my sister was in college. My dad would make dinner and watch some sci-fi movie and I would set at the computer in the same room and play a game. These were the best most relaxing times of my life.

We lived in a trailer when I was younger, but then my dad who was a carpenter by hobby, not career, built a house around it. Now there are five more rooms added to the original design, plus a closet. Anything my mom or us kids wanted, he made sure we had it.

Then recently, as in a few years back, I lost my home to the drug epidemic. My sister and I were roommates and she refused to stop allowing people who stole things and destroyed our home from coming around. She was on drugs and doing them in the house that I had decorated and saved up to buy furniture for. I could no longer stay there with these people so unlike me coming in and out. One night I even realized as the police knocked on the door at three in the morning that I would be implicated in any drug arrests of the house through no actual involvement of my own. So, I had to leave.

Eventually I bought a tiny house, but it was a shell, just the floor and walls and roof. My dad turned it into a home for me, built two staircases, a couple of walls. Now it’s a home. Because of him.

I couldn’t begin to measure the value of all he’s done for me, but then I remember. One day when I was only a teenager I was going to the store with some friends. I had a little money, but I knew if I wanted to get whatever it was, I was wanting I would need a dollar. I went and asked my dad if he had one. He said yes and handed it to me, for no particular reason I watched him take it out of his wallet. It was the only dollar he had. I don’t know or didn’t think about whether he had money in the bank or in the house somewhere else or not. All I remember realizing is that just to make me happy. To buy something I didn’t really even need, my dad would give me his very last dollar.

That's the oldest but most fond memory I have of my dad.