Dad & I: Do the albums lie?

[Original photos of my dad and I in the kitchen from 1989-1993, sorry about the dust flakes!]

I've been flipping through old photo albums and my baby book and I have found a trend with the photos that I appear with my dad in: They are predominantly in the kitchen. Obviously as a baby I didn't determine where in the house I went, so by logic, wherever I was located was where someone else put me. So, basically, my dad must have spent a lot of time in the kitchen. That's where he did (and still does) the following activities: reads the paper, does his book work, eats his meals, and many times watches the weather or news in the living room from. This is where he cools down under the ceiling fan and grabs a glass of ice water during the summer, and where he sheds his layers and warms up from a long night of snowplowing in the winter. If we had room to put a bed in there, I'm pretty sure he'd sleep in the kitchen, too. This isn't some big revelation, I've known it all my life. But what makes me wonder, then, is why the pictures of us are mostly in this one room? My guess is that when he's outside around the farm, it's impossible to catch him when he's still. He's always on the go, and he always has been. Even now I know that I've got one opportunity to catch my dad if I need to ask him a question. Do it while he's eating --so a window of about 10 min, and I'm lucky if the phone hasn't rang for him in that amount of time -- but not while he's reading the paper, which 99% of the time he does while eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce --it's his staple food. Dad always has first dibs on reading the paper, because he has to see and announce the obits before anyone else. "Well, it looks like I'm not dead yet," he'll say when his name and photo don't appear under the death notices. Did I mention my dad is sarcastic? Well he is, to the max, and to communicate on his level, you have to be too. With as stressed out as he gets, I think humor is the thing that keeps him going the most. But during a summer like this one where we have been mowing lawn consistently from all of the rain and humidity and he is backed up months on other projects, I can tell that his energizer battery is starting to drain. While my sister and I were working with him this past weekend he walked back to the truck after trimming, head down, completely drenched in sweat, the thick veins in his arms literally pulsating, and he looked up and from underneath his baseball cap he forced a smile and said, "I think I'm getting too old for this girls." So, what do you say to that? We all know that he works himself too hard, doesn't sleep enough, and intakes way more than the daily nutritional allowance in dough-nuts and soda. Yet you can't tell him to slow down or take it easy, because he feels like he's being nagged on and won't listen. Instead we give him a hard time and joke about it saying, "Come on, old man, let's go." I know it will elicit a smile and a slow, deep rumble of "Watch it..." to follow as he playfully shakes a fist at us. So, then, back to the root of the question: Why does my dad work like this - uncontrollably, as if some unknown force keeps pushing him to test his limits? And why did these photos of us, and even of just him, slowly start to change and fade away? That's something that I've got a lead on, but I'm waiting for it to all come together before I make my next post. Hint: I have to go look for our old family videos (and our VCR), too.