We had a house rule that my brother and I were allowed to sleep in a tent in the back yard whenever there was a lunar eclipse. It was just infrequent enough to be special, while frequent enough to merit a “house rule.”
I spent all summer saving my money to buy an electric bass guitar. I talked about it constantly. I scrounged every last penny and earned myself a reputation as a Scrooge that still sticks to this day with my siblings. Then, on my 16th birthday, I came home from school to find a shiny, new Fender sitting in the living room with a bow on it, alongside a gigantic amplifier.
My father had bought it for me. I was shocked to see it, but I didn’t quite realize how much it meant to my father until I told him I had to go to work. Y’see, he’d forgotten that I started a part-time after school job and had to immediately head out the door. When I said “It’s great, but I have to go,” I could see his heart sink. That image made me realize that he’d spent an astronomical amount of money just to see his son happy, and that’s a face I’ll never forget.
When I was little I always slept with a stuffed bear. He was special and I would sometimes talk to him and hug him tight when I could hear my parents fighting. I couldn’t imagine going to bed without him. But, as time passed, my older brother would rag on me a lot for being a “baby” because I slept with a toy. He used to say I’d look ridiculous as an adult with a teddy bear. I sort of realized he had a point but I couldn’t stand the thought of giving up my bear. One night, a few months after my father had left us, I remember Mom putting me to bed. I was eleven at the time. I still have no idea why, but then and there I suddenly told her that tonight I was going to let my bear sleep by himself. She promptly told me that it sounded like a good idea. She fixed up a little bed for him across the room and even got an old baby blanket for him and tucked him in. A part of my mind thought the whole thing looked a little silly but the rest of me felt instantly better and I never needed my bear again after that.
I really miss her.
One Christmas I wanted a mini-bike (small kids motorbike). This was a bit of a stretch for us, so I wasn’t sure it would happen (I was in middle-school, past the belief in Santa). My parents put a really large box under the tree, but it wasn’t big enough for the mini-bike. I spent weeks perplexed by this, shaking it, examining it, etc. I was excited, but I realized a motorbike simply couldn’t fit in that box, so it was sort of bittersweet. The box was insanely heavy, which added to the mystery.
Christmas morning I opened it and discovered it was full of bricks, and had a rhyme penciled on the side, which led me to the hidden minibike (in another room).
As a parent, I seem to have a tradition of giving my son a remote-controlled car for Christmas. He was fascinated with them as a child, and even as an adult (mid-twenties) he knows he’ll always find an RC car under the tree. Kinda silly, but it keeps some of the “kid” in Christmas (if that makes any sense).
Encouraged us to read comic books.
My Mum loved comics when she was a kid, so she looked on them as a good thing, a solid wholesome entertainment, and an education (in reading, creativity, art, and about the world as they were made in an international region, i.e. the UK). I learned a lot from comics, and they have informed my whole life.
Do you remember the line in “You’re So Vain” where “you flew your LearJet up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun”?
My folks did that for me, sort of.
My dad was a private pilot, and belonged to a flying club, so he had access to a plane (a Cessna 172, NOT a LearJet). I was VERY interested in the upcoming total eclipse (this was in 1970, when I was 13), so my dad, mother, and I flew to Prince Edward Island (NOT Nova Scotia, but also in the path of totality) to see it. Pretty damned cool.
My Mom bought me a $300 dress for junior prom. We did not typically have the money for such things. It’s just that the dress was perfect, and I remember having so much fun that year.
Mom also taught me that women can do anything a man can do, and that racism is stupid. Most importantly, she instilled in me the value of education - not by lecturing me about it but by finishing her engineering degree as a single parent when I was six years old. Then, when she left a successful career in the field two years later, she taught me that happiness is more important than money.
My bio Dad taught me The Star Spangled Banner, and chess, and how to find interesting things to do on a shoestring budget. I remember making kites out of sticks and newspapers, cities out of boxes, strange contraptions out of spools of thread. Every weekend over there was some kind of craft project.
I’m just going to stick with one thing in this post, because if I have other ones, I want to give them each their own space to shine. 
I’m not too close to my dad, though not because of some bad fight or anything. It’s mostly because he’s insanely awesome with little kids but kind of “loses interest”, for lack of a better word, when they get older. Since the little kid stage of my life is a pretty small percentage of my lifespan (and shrinking every year! :p), I remember more of his being more distant. Plus, I’m a girl, the only girl born in two generations of that family (brother and four boy cousins, and my dad had 3 brothers).
I was somewhere between 3-5, so still in the silly tiny kid stage. I woke up ass-early on a Saturday or Sunday and so did my dad. I’m gonna guess that I was probably driving him bonkers running around or something, and he wanted to calm me down and also make something for our breakfast.
I clearly remember sitting on the counter in our small galley kitchen, and he put a bowl down next to me. He got the egg carton out and showed how you crack an egg open and get it into the bowl without making an eggsplosion. He had me do one, too! And during this, he helped me count by fives for practice, too.
AND THEN, the phone rang. After he hung up, I think I asked how they work. So he showed me how to dial our (rotary) phone. Words cannot describe how learnèd and worldly I felt that day!
It seems like such a tiny thing that happens all the time when raising kids, but for whatever reason, that was an amazing bonding experience and I treasure it to this day.
My mom used to sacrifice a bit so both my sister and I could have our main interest. For my sister, it was paying for a horse and riding lessons; my sister won a lot of ribbons at horse shows and her son rides today. For me it was the Commodore home computer and, while I don’t do anything professionally with computers, it helped me become proficient and comfortable with them from an early age (ad now I get to fix my mom’s and sister’s).
Her view was that it was better to give up the money on something like that that the kids were really interested in than to have bored kids out getting in trouble, doing drugs or whatever.
My father was an amazing dad in a million ways, and he’s been gone since 1994, but two casual things he did stick with me all the time.
Once at a restaurant when I was about 10-12 years old, one of the women at a neighboring table dropped an earring. All of us looked for it for a couple of minutes but it wasn’t found. Later, when we had finished our dinner and were leaving, I turned to the woman and said I hoped she finds her earring. Outside the restaurant, my dad said to me that my saying that just showed what a lovely and caring person I am. The thing that sticks with me was the depth of his feeling, the unnecessary nature of that compliment, and the important lesson that a tiny act of kindness goes a long way, in ways you might not anticipate.
Another related incident–I think I was even younger than the restaurant episode–as when we were watching some famous person’s memorial on TV and someone said something about the deceased like “He made my life better for having known him.” I was moved and said something like “I hope someone feels that way when I’m gone.” He looked me in the eyes and said he knows for sure that someone will.
I guess these boil down to his never stinting on showing his true love for me, and when I think of him I still feel hugged. That’s a powerful feeling to carry into your adulthood, and it’s given me a lot of confidence over the years.
Oh, dear. I seem to have something in my eye.
When I was a kid, one day I was having a horrible day. (I don’t remember why.) Then at dinner, I was eating corn on the cob and somehow the corncob holder slipped off and stabbed my cheek. 
My father took me out that night to see a movie, just him and me.
When I was in college, I was seriously ill for weeks. Even after I got out of the hospital, I didn’t have much of an appetite. My mother and I were out shopping one afternoon, and we were about to go home when suddenly I said, “I’m hungry.” Instead of pointing out that I’d already had lunch and we were just fifteen minutes from home, Mom took me right into a restaurant and I ate.
Those may not sound like much, but they meant so much to me. I wrote a note to my parents before I moved out of the house about them, and neither remembered either incident.
The thing is, the good folks like that don’t keep tabs on the things they do. They give without expecting something in return. It’s the other kind who remember and when they wanted something would be able to say “Don’t you remember when I did this or that for YOU?”
Sounds like you had great parents.
Many things, but one thing comes to mind immediately.
My Dad always took me out to hit baseballs so I could get better at it for my little league team. He’d pitch endlessly and then swap and hit fly balls so I could catch them. We walked up to these fenced in tennis courts and practiced in there.
I remember one time he had a business trip and was wearing a suit. He took off his suit jacket just an hour before his flight and took me up there pitching to me, wearing suit pants and a spring jacket he’d put on.
Love is spelled T-I-M-E and my Dad spent time with me and I will never forget it my entire life.
When I was about five or six I really wanted a John Deere Tractor tricycle that the Deere dealer in town had in his store. We could barely afford food so the chance of getting it was zero. My dad worked as a welder at the John Deere factory. One day when my mom and I came home from someplace, my dad was in the process of painting my old rusty red tricycle green and yellow with real John Deere paint. I get all choked up to this day when I remember that. I hope my dad knew how much that meant to me.
Between my sophomore and junior years in high school I did a 3 week tour of Scandanavia with a wind ensemble. During my senior year (1980) the conductor invited me to go again but I didn’t think it would be remotely possible so I declined. Then the wheels started turning…
About a half hour later I figured what the hell and went into the family room and presented my grand adventure plan to my parents in which I would tour Denmark with the wind ensemble then when that was over I’d get dropped off and hitchhike around Europe for the next few months. I didn’t think anybody would go for it.
Without hesitation they said “okay”.
I had to pay my own way through university , but I got behind on rent, mom said she would float me a loan. After I graduated, I wrote her a check for the loan, she tore it up, said we’re even. I was the first out of eight( mixed family) to finish a university.
Grade 7 was a difficult year for me. No matter what I did, I couldn’t fit in. That summer my “best friend” had suddenly stopped talking to me, I was going through puberty, had stringy hair, body image issues, I was book smart but socially awkward, you name it, if it could go wrong, or be wrong, I was it.
My mom took me shopping, and bought me a pair of zipper up the side jeans. I didn’t need them, and I still remember they cost $77.00. In 1982. I wouldn’t pay that for jeans NOW, but my mother making 8 dollars an hour spent more than a day’s gross wages on jeans that made me feel special.
No they didn’t change anything about how I was treated at school, but everytime I wore them I felt awesome about me.
My dad once went to my high school to convince them to change my class schedule so I could take French. My school was being stubborn for no reason and basically told me French didn’t fit in my schedule that year. I had taken it since Grade 3, and wanted to continue, and for some reason they wouldn’t flip my schedule around to let me take it in Grade 10.
My dad has mellowed in recent years, but at the time he was pretty anti-French. Anti-bilingualism, anti-Quebec, etc. But it was important to me, and there he was.
Yes, I do, thanks.
Well, the 1st awesome thing they did for me was to adopt me
There was quite a lot of awesomeness, in small ways mostly but a few big things here and there.
One of the things that stands out was from my Dad. We didn’t really understand each other after I was grown, but I know I was loved, and I respected him for the man he was. When I was getting ready to go to college I was looking at all sorts of places, but places like Maine, Vermont, Idaho, and NH were high on my list, and I knew I wanted to do something that involved animals or wildlife. My aunt (his sister) protested strongly and told him he should just send me to one of the top schools, like Vassar or Harvard, and have me take business or teaching or something worthwhile. He told her that if I wanted to be captain of the Notre Dame football team, he wasn’t going to stop me and would help me find my way there and be proud of me no matter what I did.
He was a good man, and it makes me sad we couldn’t really connect as adults.