“Have integrity, you don’t need to be told what to do and whether it’s right or wrong. Do what you know is right, don’t do what you know is wrong.” He says every time he is disappointed by my actions. My dad is a man of integrity and is my greatest inspiration. Every time I disappoint him I feel as though I must better my behavior. He makes me want to be a better me because I hate to see the look of disappointment that he gets sometimes.
“Everything that you do in life will have consequences, make the right choices.” I must admit, I’m no angel, I’ve never been the best kid when it comes to behavior but my dad has almost always shown patience. It may be because that he was never the best behaving kid himself. He often tells me stories of troubles he got into when he was younger, at school and such. One story was about how, when he was in school, he got into trouble so while everyone was at recess he had to stay in the cafeteria. Instead of just sitting quietly, like he was supposed to, he decided to test himself and see if he could flip over the cafeteria tables. It turns out he could but with consequences that led to him cutting his hand open on a sharp point that was on the table. He had to get stitches. Let’s just say, he never did that again. The point is, he learned the hard way that doing stupid things gets you nowhere fast, and he doesn’t want me to make stupid mistakes that will just set me back in life.

“Why do tomorrow what you can do today?” He often says. There are a lot of times where I don’t like to do things until I completely have to. I’m a lazy kid but he doesn’t want that to be how I am for the rest of my life. He always encourages me not to procrastinate and to do what I should be doing instead of waiting until the last minute which is what I usually do. He doesn’t want me to get stuck rushing everything to get finished at the last minute when it could’ve been done days ago. He knows that once you get into a bad path of falling behind that it is hard to catch up.

My dad’s life hasn’t been awful but it was never easy. Growing up in the unsteady period of racial discrimination and social reform in the ‘70s was not easy for a black family. It was especially hard on a young black boy who had to try harder everyday to prove himself. He experienced a lot of discrimination in school, at stores and even on the streets. He told me of times in school when they were reading the book Huckleberry Finn and every time the ‘n’-word was said aloud he would get looks and glances from the kids around him, along with all of the other black kids in his class. He also described the anger, pain and embarrassment of all the times he had to deal with people crossing the street when they see him because they were afraid of getting mugged. He had to walk 2 miles to school everyday with his younger sister, my aunt, to get to school because my grandmother had to work to support the family. My grandfather, who I never knew, was a drunk and a bad husband at best. He died when my father was very young though so he could not support the family. He was lucky for what he had ,and he has always been grateful for the small chances here and there that had been given to him.

My dad, a medium height man with dark brown skin and a round belly, has always been there for me. I get these pains sometimes, in my legs and knees, for no reason at all. The pain will just grow and spread. It would ache for minutes to hours at a time. Most of the time I had to give myself a leg massage to make the pains go away because they would keep me up at night and make me cry. On one night, when the pains were particularly bad in both legs and the massages wouldn’t help, my dad encouraged me to get up and stretch. I was crying ,and I didn’t want to because I was in so much pain but he insisted. I got up and walked around a bit. He then showed me how to use the wall to stretch my calves and how to stretch other leg muscles that I can’t recall the name of. To my surprised it actually helped to tone down the pain a lot. Every time after that, if the massage didn’t work, I would get up and stretch. As I got older, the pains became less frequent and barely come anymore but when they do, I know to stretch.

He has always wanted what was best for me. There have been so many times when I’ve been so angry with him because he punished me for something I did wrong or yelled at me for it, I didn’t realize until now that he was just looking out for me.

I love my dad. He is a good man, regardless of anything he has done bad or said bad. He is an honest and respectful man who is full of integrity and who takes responsibility for his actions.