My father’s secret mission was to teach me that when I held my 3rd grade fist above the face of my brother and threatened to plow through it with the force of a bulldozer that I could recognize it was myself I wanted to explosively dig through for the sake of some good old-fashioned confession and perhaps some knockout self-acceptance. He was like Moses or Yoda or Mickey from Rocky in that he was all about getting things done by using fear and anger as tools for opening the Jedi training ground of the heart, rather than by resorting to Capone style skull-thuggery the minute you realized you were behind in the cards. Whenever he caught me fighting with my brother, first he’d yell for me to stop and step away like he was my partner on the police force and knew I didn’t want to cross the line. Next, he’d tell me to talk to my brother until we could forgive each other, which if I’m being honest, felt like how I’d imagine a government agent would feel if he was asked by his own to come to common ground with a double agent who just last year water boarded him. Lastly, he’d turn around in the yard and walk back inside the house, his shadow filling the small kitchen window that looked out onto us boys like he was taking notes for an experiment in conversion and had his finger on a PSYOP button he’d need if we were to both flip him off and run into the woods with our buttocks hanging out of our pants like two empowered baboons. He may have carried himself all spooky and self-restrained like the “Smoking Man” from X-files, but I knew he was the most off the chain of all of us. In fact, sometimes, when he got behind a camera mostly, I’d catch him admiring some view and getting all misty eyed like he’d just been there to see his first born enter the world, and realized he wanted me.