The other day, I was watching TV and someone asked another person, what is the best advice your dad ever gave you? For some reason, I felt compelled in my head to answer this question for myself and started thinking about advice I’ve gotten from my dad. I have to admit, I tuned out of the show completely at that point and don’t know what good dad advice anyone else was given; I can only tell you some dad advice I got from my own.

Before I get into that, a couple of things about my dad that are relevant to this story.

1. I’m adopted. I’m not telling you that because it in any way changes the quality of the advice or how I feel about my dad. We have no DNA in common but he’s as much a dad to me as anyone’s is to them. I did once tell the story of how I came to be adopted on a blog I used to have, so I’m not going to tell the whole thing again. You can ask me sometime in person if you’re so interested. I am telling you that for two reasons. First, because I knew who my biological father was and he wasn’t completely out of my life until I was a teenager, so sometimes when I say “my dad” people ask me to clarify. There’s nothing to clarify as far as I’m concerned. My dad is the one who adopted me. If I do tell you a story about my biological father, I will either refer to him as that, as my mother’s first husband, or sometimes I just call him by his name. I just have the one dad. The second reason it’s relevant is that I didn’t meet him until I was around 10 years old, and this story makes more sense if you know that piece.

2. My dad isn’t exactly an advice giving kind of dad. Sometimes I don’t think he’s really a “dad” kind of dad. He’s not dorky, or stuffy, or strict. I’ve never seen him with the white tube socks pulled up to his knees. I don’t think he ever sat me down and told me what I should or shouldn’t be doing with my life. He’s actually the first one out of my whole family that came to appreciate Clint when we started dating. My dad didn’t care that Clint was already graduated from high school when we met or that he didn’t go to a fancy college or come from a rich family. He even took the first picture of Clint and me together, at my sister’s eighth grade graduation. Although to be fair, when he took he said he thought my mom would flip when she got the film developed so maybe the picture wasn’t all about us. Side note, my parents got divorced almost 20 years ago. But going back to my dad and his advice giving, if you ask him what you should do he will tell you, and he certainly has opinions, but he’s not going around spouting off all this sage dad wisdom all the time. You have to find the nuggets here and there and apply them yourself.

Okay, with those bits out of the way, back to this advice from my dad. It goes back to a day when I was 16 and we were on our way to Albany. I had gotten my first car a few months earlier and it only came with a radio. It was a 1986 Nissan and who knows if a tape player was even an option on the thing when it was new. I told my parents all I wanted that year for the holidays was a tape player for my car. They went a little above and got me a CD player. I was so excited, and part of the gift was that my dad and I were going to take a trip to Albany to get it installed in my car. They even let me skip a day of school for it. It was going to be great. Actually, this might be one of the first times my dad and I did something that was just the two of us. When we had first met, he was just a friend of my mom’s and I honestly thought he was pretty cool. My mom was young when I was born and he’s a few years younger than her, so he was never like this stuffy grownup. He had a Corvette, he listened to rock music, and he always treated me like I was an interesting person myself, not some boring kid that he talked to just to be nice to my mom. One time I told him I thought I could eat six jelly donuts and he said he didn’t think I could do it. We made a bet and I ate all the donuts. I don’t remember what I won in the bet but I can tell you although I won the battle, I lost the war because I later threw up all those donuts. So we definitely had some fun times, but then he went from being my mom’s friend to my mom’s new husband and I was definitely not as excited about him after that.

Back to my story, this trip to Albany happened a few years after he and my mom had gotten married and by this time, I was more mature and less annoyed about this new man living at our house. No matter how I treated him though, I could tell he always just wanted to be the best dad he could be, and I always appreciated that he wasn’t like everyone else’s dad. He was just the guy who bet me I couldn’t eat six jelly donuts, the guy who would headbang to Metallica in the living room, the fun-loving guy with the big booming laugh that fills a room.

On the drive up to Albany, because I only had my permit, we agreed I’d drive partway and once we hit the highway I would pull over and we’d switch so my dad could do the more technical (potentially dangerous) driving. We left our house in Copake and headed north. If you’re from the Copake area, you might remember that back in the day, the intersection of Route 7 and Center Hill Road was kind of a dangerous one but I think we all liked it that way. If you were coming over Center Hill, you could see clear across to Route 7 and you’d know if someone was coming from the other way, so basically you could blow through that yield at about 50 MPH and be fine. Maybe some people weren’t fine because now they reconfigured and make you stop at the end. But it wasn’t like that in 1998. I’d seen adults do it many times, but I was scared so as we were going down Center Hill, I started hitting the brakes. My dad looked at me and said, “you can look and see that no one is coming so you don’t have to slow down.” I said I was just afraid and he said, “if you don’t have to stop, just keep going.” So I did, I zipped right through that intersection like a real grownup, and everything was fine. Like I said, he always treated me like a real person and never like a kid. This time was no exception. The rest of the day was largely uneventful; I remember he asked me if I was purposely hitting every drainage grate on the Taconic (I wasn’t although I guess it felt like it), we got the stereo installed, we ate lunch at the Olive Garden, and we returned home unscathed.

But back to my dad and his advice. If you don’t have to stop, just keep going. It’s certainly not the only advice he ever gave me, but it’s stuck with me for almost 30 years and whether or not I’m directly thinking of it, it’s always in there. If we’ve talked at all lately, I have probably lamented to you the one thing after another that is happening with this food truck. I’ll tell that whole story when I feel we are at the end, but for now just know basically nothing, from paint, to plumbing, to electrical, has gone to plan and every day I just want to give up. We’re stuck in the middle and I can’t see the end and I hate it. One of the best parts of being the owner of something is you have control over that something, and right now I have no control over so many of these things and I just keep wondering what I am doing and why I chose to do this. When I stop and think rationally, I do know (mostly anyway) what I am doing, and I do know why I chose to do this. We bring the food to the people in a way no one else does it. Because we do it like no one else, we have to figure more of it out than anyone else. And I insisted on buying this food trailer unlike any other, which I knew when I looked at it that it would be trouble, but I still couldn’t say no.

Am I going to give up? No matter what I say, or no matter how much I complain, we all know the answer is no. I still have money in the bank and I still have a dream of running this successful catering business. And if I don’t have to stop, I may as well keep going.