Okay, so if I wrote everything I ever learned from Irv Clapp, my father-in-law, and Jack Allen Kroh, my good old dad, you would be reading for a long, long time.

So I will tell you one thing that popped up this week.

Friday is date day. We do a lot of mentoring in our church so we need a day to just go away and talk to each other. It was a beautiful spring day, the first of its kind. Warm enough for the convertible to be open. Not too hot, not too cold. Perfection.

We planned to drive to New Paltz and take our daughter out for lunch. We wanted to see her, and were eager to drive through the countryside.

But we had a leaking tire. We talked about options and then I said, “Well, what would Irv do in this situation?  More to the point here, since it is tires were talking about, what would Jack Kroh advise us to do?”

My dad changed tires from the time he was fourteen until he re-tired (hee-hee) well after retirement age. I remember one time walking across a snowy unplowed alley and he identified every tire track the whole way across.

Irv kept his dryer running twenty years after they quit making it because he bought all the parts he could when they went on sale because the dryer was discontinued by the company.

These guys knew how to do things!

We got tires, four new ones, and went to the movies and out for a burger later that day.  We still got to talk.  Although they’ve both been gone many years, the advice of both dads is indelibly imprinted in our minds. When we walked into the tire shop it did smell like home. I knew my dad and Roger’s dad would have approved of our better- safe- than- sorry date day.