Plum Crazy

It's a lot of fun when you're a kid to have a father who is a graphic artist. Other fathers did "serious work." My father played with magic markers and colored pencils. I used to love it when he would take us to work with him. We would color and play on the Lucy. The Lucy was a fabulous machine with a seat that would move forward and backward, enabling an artist to enlarge or reduce artwork to trace. But to a kid, it was like a carnival ride. At Daddy's office. Wheeeee!!!

I attribute a lot of my success in the work world to my father. He never treated me like there were things I couldn't do just because I was a girl. Because of it, I don't work that way with men. I am able to compete with them without any self-imposed non-level playing field. Hey, I'm now CFO of Technology at my company. When I started working there 9 years ago, I was a junior financial analyst. I'm doing something right.

He made me the Yankees fan I am today. My grandfather, may he rest in peace, used to take us to Mets games. But my father used to take us to Yankees games. I liked the Yankees games better. They were/are a much more exciting team. I still remember the Yankees of the late 70s, and Thurman Munson is still my all-time favorite Yankee. I loved going to the games and seeing him play.

He taught me to appreciate modern art. As a youngster, I saw nothing all that impressive about it. It lacked some of the technical magnificence of the earlier artists. But he got me to think beyond the technique to the concepts expressed in the art. He was right. He was also right that Jackson Pollack's splatter and drip paintings are a lot, lot harder to create than they look.

It wasn't all fabulousness. He was a workaholic. I didn't get to see him nearly as much as I would have liked. He also had a bad temper when I was very young, and I was scared of him. I give him credit for working on that. It couldn't have been easy. Although he still yells at their cat sometimes for doing silly, cat-like things. And he's not the easiest guy to talk to, being kind of reserved. I get that from him. But all in all, he's my Dad, and I love him.