A found smile

Anybody who follows this blog knows that I think my father was a great man.

Not great in any big, dramatic way, just one time after another, a lifetime of "doing the right thing" that adds up to greatness. I found another one today.

I'm trying to rehabilitate a tiller that's been in the family about as long as I have. Daddy was working on getting it running right before he died, and I was going to pick that up and work on a garden this year. One problem - I can't find the ever-bleepin' carburetor! But that's not the topic of this post.

While I was looking for the ever-bleepin' carb, I found two boxes that I'd never looked inside before. Turns out, they are the boxes Daddy used to empty his desk when he was laid off from Lockheed Martin.

Not much surprising inside - lots of file folders (Daddy LIVED by file folders), mostly documents of expense reports from the travels he had to do. Some performance awards, and tenure awards, pictures of me and Jenni that he kept on his desk, the normal kind of stuff you'd expect to find as a result of a 58-year old man cleaning out his desk after a 30-year career at the same company.

Except for one thing.

In the middle of all the file folders of expense reports to Turkey, Greece, Belgium, and Ohio, was one file folder that WASN'T an expense report. It's label simply said "United States Constitution".

And yep, inside this uncharacteristically-thin file folder (thin for Daddy's files, anyway), was a pamphlet of the United States Constitution.

He thought that was important enough to deserve its own folder in his files at work, and important enough to bring home with him, when he cleaned out his desk.

That simultaneously made me smile, and leak tears, just as it's doing now.

Update: I just decided, I think I'll take that folder and put it in my files in my cubicle at work. I've already got my own copy at home; and I think Daddy was right - it's worth having a copy handy independent of the Internet.