I’m Not Sir. My Dad Was Sir
I was walking through the lobby of our building the other day when I passed a young man wearing a nice tie. I told him I liked it.
“Thank you, sir,” he said.
He was being perfectly polite. Respectful, actually. There was absolutely nothing wrong with what he said. But as I kept walking, I found myself thinking, Sir? I’m not sir. My dad was sir.
Sir is what you call your father. Or your grandfather. Or the gentleman who’s about to explain why you’ve been pulled over.
Although, now that I think about it, I’ve been pulled over at my age and I still call the officer “sir,” so apparently this entire system is more complicated than I thought.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe “sir” doesn’t have as much to do with age as my initial reaction suggested. When I call a police officer sir, I’m not checking his birth certificate first. I’m showing respect. Maybe that young man in the lobby was simply doing the same thing.
And when I think about a man I respected, I immediately think about my dad.
Dad accomplished a remarkable amount during his life. He was a fighter pilot in the Air Force and later flew helicopters as a rescue pilot. After his military service, he became an oral surgeon and eventually a college professor and department chair at Utah Valley University. By almost any conventional measure, Dad had an impressive resume.
Dad also died far too young. One of the stranger realities of my life is that I am now older than my father was when he died. You would think that might somehow change the way I picture him, but it hasn’t. In my mind, he is still Dad. He is still the grown-up. He is still, apparently, the sir.
But one of the best things anyone ever told me about my dad had nothing to do with being a fighter pilot, an oral surgeon, a professor or a department chair.
I had a really good friend growing up who was a member of my faith but had never been active. After I was married, he called me one day and told me he was going on an LDS mission. I was floored. I certainly hadn’t seen that coming.
During that conversation, I learned that my dad had been teaching several of my friends about the gospel. That surprised me too, but it wasn’t the part of the conversation that stayed with me. My friend told me he had been watching my dad over the years.
He had watched the way Dad treated my mom. My parents would go on walks together, usually holding hands, and Dad gave her his attention. When they came across one of my friends, Dad would stop and visit. He didn’t offer the obligatory adult hello and keep walking. He wanted to know how they were doing, and my friends knew he genuinely cared about the answer.
Then my friend told me something I have never forgotten he wanted to be that kind of man when he grew up.
That landed differently.
My dad had flown fighter jets and rescue helicopters. He had become an oral surgeon, a college professor and a department chair. Those are pretty good answers if someone asks what you accomplished with your life. Yet when my friend described the man he hoped to grow up to be, he didn’t mention any of them. He talked about watching my dad hold my mom’s hand. He remembered Dad stopping during a walk to talk with him. He remembered how Dad made him feel.
Apparently nobody had told my friend he was supposed to be impressed by the fighter jets.
I’ve built a pretty good resume of my own. I have two master’s degrees, one in Human Resources and an MBA. I’ve worked hard throughout my career and reached the VP level. I’m proud of those things, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with being proud of them. They represent a lot of years, a lot of work, quite a few mistakes and, hopefully, some things I learned along the way.
Maybe somewhere in all of that I accumulated enough credentials to qualify for “sir.”
I still think there should have been some sort of notification.
But that brief encounter in the lobby has made me think about what I actually hope earns someone’s respect. I hope it isn’t primarily a degree, a title or whatever happens to be written on my business card. Those things matter, but my friend taught me something about my dad that I don’t think Dad could have taught me himself.
People are watching us when we have no idea they’re watching.
That sounds a little creepy when I put it that way, but you know what I mean.
My friend had been watching Dad simply live his life. Dad wasn’t trying to mentor him while walking through the neighborhood. He wasn’t demonstrating the proper way to treat your wife. He wasn’t building his personal brand. He was walking with the woman he loved, holding her hand, and stopping to talk with some kids he cared about.
Decades later, one of those kids remembered.
There is one more thing I’ve thought about as I’ve worked on this story.
On Father’s Day in 1995, I gave Dad a card. The front joked that throughout the years I had always spelled “friend” D-A-D, followed by the punch line that this explained why I had always gotten such lousy grades. Considering spelling was never exactly one of my strengths growing up, the card was probably more accurate than either of us realized.
Inside, I wrote something simple:
“I really appreciate the advice I can get just by picking up the phone.”
A few weeks later, on July 14, we learned Dad had terminal cancer. He died the following April. I didn’t know it when I wrote those words, but that would be the last Father’s Day card I ever gave him.
Looking at that card now, what strikes me isn’t that I thanked him for what he had accomplished. I thanked him because I could pick up the phone.
Dad was there.
Which brings me back to the young man in the lobby.
I didn’t know him. I simply noticed his tie and told him I liked it. He didn’t know anything about me either. He didn’t know about the degrees, the job title or anything else I might put on a resume. He was just being polite when he said, “Thank you, sir.”
I’m still not completely comfortable with it.
In my mind, my dad is the sir. Maybe he always will be. But I’ve found myself wondering what Dad would think about the life I’ve built. I’m sure he would be proud of the degrees and the career. He was my dad, so there’s a decent chance he would have told people about them whether they asked or not.
But I hope those wouldn’t be the things that made him most proud.
I hope he would look at the way I treat my wife, my children, my grandchildren, my friends and even the people I happen to pass in a lobby and think I had learned something from him.
So if people are going to start calling me “sir,” apparently without asking my permission, I suppose I can live with it.
I just hope I earn it the same way Dad did.
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