He said that he did smile because he was working for his family and that made him happy.
When I was growing up, I always had the illusion that my father loved his job. He seemed to always wake up with a smile, even when he was walking out the door to go to work. When he came home from work at night, he was smiling and in the best of moods. He always had the time to spend with us and play. It was until I had graduated from college and I was sitting at the kitchen table that we had a chance for a real grown-up chat. It was early morning and I found dad sitting in the kitchen all alone. Everyone else was still in bed and the house was quiet. He told me that he was thinking about retiring and I couldn’t help but comment about how much he would miss his job. He laughed and said that he hated that job and he wasn’t going to miss anything about it. I was taken aback by thinking about all those smiles when he was going to and coming home from work. He said that he did smile because he was working for his family and that made him happy. He asked me if I remembered all the time he had spent working on the furnace and the air conditioning unit. I remembered that whenever there was a problem with the heating or air conditioning, he was right there fixing it. He said that if he weren’t so old, he may be willing to become an HVAC tech, but he didn’t regret the choices he had made in life. He looked at me and asked when I had become a woman and I smiled and told him it while he was being a dad.