There’s a number of reasons why my dad’s my personal hero.
The greatest reason, of course, is that he moved his family halfway around the world to the US, even though he didn’t know how to speak the language, in order to give his kids a better life. College-educated (in Bolivia), he struggled (spent more than one hot summer roofing houses in northern Michigan), but eventually settled into a nice cozy house. Nothing fancy, but his kids went to college & made lives for ourselves. Talk about grit.
Years later, and he’s still at it. He moved back to Bolivia (w/ my mom, of course), where they bought another cozy little house, and are now hard at work helping their church community (I hear he’s doing roofing work there, too).
And on the eve of their visit back to the US to see their kids & grandkids, my dad placed second in a tennis tournament (in the Urbari Tennis Club tourney). He’s 59, and he went toe-to-toe w/ a university student from Tarija for two hours before falling to a rival nearly a third his age (after beating a similar foe in 2½ hours the day before). Talk about grit!
I may have to let him mop the racquetball court w/ me when he stops by.
