I finished watching Battlestar Gallactica Season 2.5 and it made me think about my father

Never Done: I finished watching Battlestar Gallactica Season 2.5

Humility is about seeking wisdom from others, right? Especially when we have some resistance to the wisdom? So ... how many times did my friends have to tell me to watch Battlestar Gallactica before I did? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? And why didn't I believe them earlier? Because I don't think of myself as liking SciFi. But they told me I'd like BSG. But I didn't think I would. I know this might not seem like the most world-changing issue to ever come down the pike, but if I think about it in terms of being open to new experiences, and about being a person who says yes to other people -- two qualities which I really love in others, and which I think are particularly important for parents of teenagers -- then it's actually pretty significant.

Plus, I have a HUGE daddy complex on Admiral Adama, and I just can't stop watching him. He *is* my dad. He's tough and compassionate and humble and powerful and seasoned and rational and willing to admit when he's made a mistake. Just like my dad. I recently had a reader request (I had a reader request!) for more info on my dad. Such a huge subject, one's parent ... where to start? I guess the big thing in my family is that in addition to my father having all the above qualities, he also, it turned out, had the ability to keep a secret. A big secret. From everyone he loved. Including his wife and two daughters.

He was an optical engineer, and he designed cameras. When I was a kid, I thought he designed eyeglass lenses, and then I thought he designed camera lenses for consumer cameras. I really didn't grasp what he was doing at all, but I thought it was in the way that kids don't grasp what their parents do if they have confusing (to a kid) middle class jobs. But it turns out it wasn't that at all. It turns out that nobody understood what he was doing, and for good reason; it was top secret.

Part of the problem with writing about his top secret life is that I still have some child-like confusions about it, which make me feel a little embarrassed. Also, I am getting on a plane for Germany in a few hours, and I haven't packed, and it's the night before my mom's yortsayt, and I didn't do my taxes yet, and I am generally distracted. So let's take this in the spirit that it's OK to say a little, and if it remains impressionistic and mysterious ... well, that's what it feels like to me most of the time. My dad took film footage of the Able and Baker bomb tests in the Bikini Islands. His work there connected him with some people in photo reconnaissance, and he ended up working at Boston University Physical Research Lab, where he was part of a team building cameras that could spy on the Soviet Union. It was the Space Race, and the Soviets had gotten Sputnik up into orbit. Eventually BUPRL was bought out by Itek Corporation, and my dad and his colleagues got a CIA contract to design and build the first aerial reconnaissance satellite camera. So over the next I don't know how many years, he was flying to Palo Alto and Cape Canaveral and Washington DC and wherever else people fly when they are doing high-level top-secret military industrial complex work, but we didn't know about any of it. He was meeting with Rockefellers and Presidents and heads of CIA and NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) and NASA, and I pretty much pictured him making eyeglass lenses in Lexington, MA.

I mean, I was little. He would come home and build me stilts to walk on, and he would plant corn and grow grapes and we would make wine and tap maple trees and sugar off and build furniture in his wood shop and then he'd go away and then he'd come back and sometimes he'd be upset and sometimes he'd be distracted and usually he was pretty stable and powerful and rational and compassionate and humble and tough, just like Admiral Adama, but he was my dad.

I don't know how he kept it all together -- living a secret work life and full family life. We didn't find out until it was declassified. (Al Gore declassified the work in 1995 so that he could use the photographic imagery to study deforestation in the Black Forest.) And when I say "we" I mean, all of us, including my mother. My parents were incredibly close, and they always told us there were no secrets between them, so imagine what a mind-fuck it was for my mother to learn that there had been a huge secret between them for thirty five years. Imagine the effects of thirty five years of secrecy on the family. Imagine my father's relief when the wall finally came down. (His blood pressure came down to normal, without medication; his anger and depression eased.) And imagine why, when ten years after he died, after I never got enough information about his real life, I encountered BSG, I might be fixated on watching the strong, complex, cutthroat yet compassionate military leader at work. And by the way, it's the same reason I am obsessed with Mad Men -- because I get to watch Don Draper, a strong, conflicted, brilliant, complex, cutthroat man with a secret, at work.

So it might not seem like the most world-changing event to come down the pike, but it means something to me. And now I'm going to start watching Season 3.