Community Corner

When Did You Learn Your Father Was Fallible?

With Father's Day approaching, can you share a story of the day you realized even Father doesn't always know best?

I was in my mid-teens the year my family set up for dinner at an old wooden beach house. My father was rigging a small 12-inch charcoal grill so we could use it to make hotdogs out on the wooden deck, even though he couldn't find the legs for the grill.

He pulled a pot out of the kitchen as a base, set the grill on the pot, put the whole contraption on the wooden deck, and commenced lighting the coals. I looked cockeyed at the contraption, wondering why the heat of the coals wouldn't flow through the grill, through the pot and onto the wooden deck.

But he was my father! Surely he must know something I didn't know.

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He didn't.

Within a few minutes, a scorch mark appeared on the deck—a mark on the rented beach house deck that ultimately took the week for my father to repair. He told that from then on, I should always speak up if I saw him doing something ... well, you know.

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With Father's Day approaching next weekend, we thought we'd ask for your stories about Dad. Am I the only one with a story like that?

Does anyone else remember the day you went from "Father Knows Best" to "maybe he doesn't"? Can you share a story about when you discovered your Dad was more fallible than you thought?

And if that's a story you don't have, maybe you can share the best advice he ever gave you. Maybe the worst advice? We'll take that too!


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