My Father: A Critical Thinker With a Loving Touch

It was the still the 60s, and our household challenged the norms: my mother commuted to work Monday through Friday, while my father stayed home. All through elementary school, my father would say goodbye to us at the door, always with the same admonition: Don’t believe everything they tell you.
He was serious.  Very serious.  My sister and I excelled in school and generally followed rules, so it was one of those warnings we didn’t quite know what to do with. But in the end, for better or worse, those words, and the man they came from, shaped who I am.  Now when a friend tells me something surprising, I find myself asking, usually politely (though not always, I concede), how she knows it’s true.

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