Dear Dad, You Were Right!

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished by how much he’d learned in seven years.” -- Mark Twain. A way back in the year nineteen hundred and seventy, a bunch of us kids threw a rock concert in one of our city's parks. We were raising money to help us beat the school board into allowing us boys to wear long hair in our high schools. My father, having seen the flyers around town, told me that I was absolutely not to attend the concert. And he told me that, in the event he discovered I had attended said concert, he would murder me. That being the case, you can certainly understand why I could not tell him that I had to attend--since I was one of the concert's organizers. The day of the concert, a beautiful sunny Saturday, he and my mother drove into the park and up behind the big flatbed trailer we had rented for our bands' sound stage. Our big generators could not be heard over the roar of the great rock music. My father left Mom sitting, got out of the car and strode determinedly toward my girlfriend and me. He politely asked me if he could have a word with me.

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