My Father, Victor Puyat

I'm supposed to be studying and not posting, but I can't help it...I just read my sister Myra's Father's Day tribute to our dad, Victor Puyat...and I am ROFL! If you want to check it out, visit her blog at http://thismerrywidow.blogspot.com/

I just have to add my own two cents....

My father is an artist who does not have an artist's temperament and works as a businessman. When I was a child, he read hundreds of bed-time stories to me, made up silly games (i.e. "horsie-horsie" and "magic-finger", which I have taught to three-year-olds the world over, and which they all love!), and taught me how to make chapati. When I was a little older, he showed me how to make a poached egg in a microwave. He also tried to teach me how to drive and play tennis, but that didn't work out so well. I have to admit that many of my likes and interests as well as almost all my personal quirks have their genesis in watching VGP do the things he likes to do...Following are just a few things that I owe to my dad:

1. Persisting interest in all things Indian. When I was fifteen, he invited me to tag-along on a 3-week business trip to India. We saw the Taj Mahal, a couple of tigers, lots of cows, visited several pharmaceutical factories and ate kamayan with local employees, sampled lethal Indian-Schezuan cuisine in Bombay, hob-nobbed with the Tatas (Indian business moguls), went to the desert in a bus with no seats or air-conditioning (it was like sitting in a mobile Turbo Broiler)...the beginning of a life-long connection....
2. My love for maps, globes, atlases, and a general interest in geography. My dad is a geography freak, he loves devices that tell him where he is (he had a compass on his watch for a time). When I'm bored, I study maps of the different continents and am honestly entertained. This actually came in really useful when I returned from Europe to the U.S. and had to find a job pronto--I started private tutoring, and one of the subjects I had to teach was 5th grade geography. Honestly, I rocked.
3. My itchy feet. When I say I want to see the world, I literally mean the whole world- not just the nice parts. Growing up, I listened enthralled and with envy to my dad's accounts of his visits to exotic locations: Brazil, Turkey, Israel, Kuwait, Pakistan, China...the more remote, the more impressed I was.
4. My ability to retain a rather large number of random facts. My dad is a big reader, but the only novel I actually recall seeing him read was "Chesapeake" by James Michener (which he made me read when I was 8, just to see how long it would take me...) What I do remember is the stacks of Time, Life, Newsweek, The Economist, National Geographic, Fortune, etc., in the basement and the hundreds of geography, history, economics, travel, and business books that lined the shelves of our upstairs hallway, almost every single one of which has my fingerprints on them... To this day, I read practically anything. Every random fact I know, I owe indirectly to him.
5. Daily prayer. My dad does mental prayer every day and he usually snores while doing it. But, I have learned a lot from that "It's better to pray while asleep and snoring than not to pray at all" attitude. It's actually been a really good example for me. Quite encouraging.
6. Life-long attraction to quiet men. I'm a chatterbox, but I utterly abhor men who talk too much. One time, not too long ago, I was having a quiet dinner alone at home with my dad, and I asked him something that I then considered to be pretty serious. As I waited for a reaction, he silently finished his food, stood up, took his dirty dishes to the sink and... walked away without saying a word! Go figure-I thought he just hadn't heard what I said. A month later, we were again having dinner alone in the kitchen, when he said "You know, about what you said..." Wahahaha! Lesson: Never assume that a person's silence indicates that they are neither thinking, listening, or...feeling. This, in particular, has been a helpful life lesson.

Happy Father's Day, Dad! There is no one quite like you.


"Thank you, India...thank you providence..."