Morning Coffee With Dad

My father and I didn't talk much when I was growing up. He worked long hours and I was busy being a teenager. We loved each other, but we didn't really know each other.

After he retired, I started stopping by on my way to work. Just fifteen minutes. He'd have the coffee ready, too strong, in the same chipped mugs from when I was a kid.

At first we talked about the weather and baseball. Then slowly, over months, he started telling me stories I had never heard: how he met my mother at a dance, the summer he worked on a fishing boat, the time he got lost in a city where he didn't speak the language and a stranger walked him two miles to his hotel.

I've learned more about my father in two years of morning coffee than in the twenty years before.

It's never too late to get to know the people you love.