Shok

A few weeks ago, Dad suggested that I blog about him. It's difficult to condense a parent into one blog post, so I thought I'd tell the story of my Dad through the various offices he had as I was growing up.

In the 1980s, Dad was one of the Assistant Pastors at a church built into the side of a hill. I have a dim memory of visiting what I assume was his office. It was a small room with a desk, chair and I believe a coat rack of some sort. There was a large window on the back wall  that overlooked a peculiar sight. The best way I can think to describe it is to say it was a concrete hole in the ground. It wasn't a swimming pool, underground bunker, or drainage ditch (so far as I could tell.) It was just a big hole in the ground that had been given a concrete liner. It fascinated and frightened me - I wanted to explore it, but was afraid that I'd fall in and never be able to get out again if I ventured too close.

For a little over two years in the mid-1990s, Dad worked at the passageway church (so nicknamed due to all of its hallways and hiding spots). His office was tucked behind the big stage in the sanctuary. After, or sometimes even before, the services my brothers and I would go sit in his office and wait for the adults to finish their conversations. Adjacent to the office Dad had his own private washroom which no one ever seemed to use. The office itself contained a large wooden desk and executive-type chair, a coffee table and a couch or two. The drawers in his desk could nearly always be counted on to provide us with pretzels, red liquorice, or other treats, and there was a very interesting coffee table book full of pictures of life in Israel in biblical times. Between the food and the reading material, I was more than content.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dad's office doubled as our family computer room. At one point, we squeezed three desks or desk-like pieces of furniture into that room - the computer table, Mom's antique wooden desk, and a utilitarian metal desk where Dad kept his papers in order. Sometimes Dad would be working on his real estate deals at one desk while Mom paid bills at her desk and one of us kids played on the computer. It was a very small room, though, so this happened rarely. Dads desk at this point was also where I'd find the quarters to pay for our Sunday paper. It took quite a while to find his hiding spot, but I eventually figured out that one of his German beer Steins was stuffed full of quarters. Every Sunday morning, I'd pilfer a few of them and walk down the street a few blocks to buy the weekend paper.

I think that Dad's current office is his laptop. Rather than being stuck in one room to get work done, he manages to take care of whatever it is he needs to do wherever he can find a place to sit. His laptop doesn't have it's own washroom or dispense snacks, but when we visit him my brothers and I still do have a certain amount of fascination for his workspace. :)