[Fat Charlie]

My 78 year old dad doesn't chip in with anything but conversation. But he grew up in the 50s. I was raised by him, but I'm actually conservative. I love DIY, and I firmly believe that if you love eating you have to have an understanding of cooking or you're just a passive victim of whoever presents you with your food.

Since I'm a caveman of a different generation, it's easy to accept his caveman-ness as being just a different iteration of mine. We love each other and tolerate each other. Really, that's the best you can hope for in today's world: I love my dad and disagree with him on most things, but see where he is coming from. He still manages to be a fan of us, thinks my wife and our kids are awesome, and we get along. I'm taking what he taught me and am applying it the best I can, even though I know it's nowhere near the way he would. But I'm not him, my kids aren't me, and we're all doing the best we can. The problems I'm facing aren't what he had to face, and the problems my kids are facing aren't what I had to face. I'm facing my problems with the tools my parents gave me, and I'm trying to equip my kids with the tools they need to face God knows what. I hope they don't face their problems the way I would, because I'm a stick in the mud. I grew up in the Cold War, I'm not who anyone should look to for advice in a world of climate change, domestic terrorism and pandemic.

Give me what I think of as a simple problem, and I'm all over it. With today's problems, I'll apply what I know because it's what I know, but my tools aren't the right tools to solve them. I expect that the best ideas are going to come from people younger than me.

It's really sad. We've only missed one Thanksgiving with him in 29 years (one year I was in the desert with with 140,000 of my closest friends), and we're not having it this year because we don't want to kill him. Because we're at work every day and our kids are in school, while he leaves his house once a week to buy groceries. So, yeah: problems he's never faced, I've never faced, and neither one of us is equipped to deal with.