My Dad

I was thinking about my dad today. I was thinking that when I was little it was really cool that he was always writing papers. I never knew what, exactly, he was writing, but it seemed he always had a yellow legal pad around that he was working on. He would write at home after we got done with dinner. Then I would get to go make copies with him at the office. That was fun, pressing the luminescent green Start button on the Xerox machine. So I have this memory of him writing a lot. I know now that he was writing about fly ash, concrete, and related materials, and I wonder how much could really be said about such things. I mean, I remember his papers being pages and pages long when completed. What could one write about at such length regarding these matters? I'm still a little perplexed by this, but I know that even though it seems like very straight-forward, unimaginative subject matter, writing about this stuff was my dad's creative outlet. He chose the words that went down on paper just like his father, a pastor, would do for Sunday morning sermons. It was the process of creating that was important, not necessarily just the subject at hand.