My dad was a big Mark Twain fan. He had a couple of Twain quotes that he loved to recite, and one in particular he liked to recite in my presence: "When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant that I could hardly bear to have the old man around. But when I had to have twenty-one years old, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in seven years." I could never really think of Dad as ignorant, even when I was fourteen. He was a walking encyclopedia, an encyclopedia that I consulted daily. But he was an easy man to underestimate. Partly this was because he was a great listener, and like all great listeners, he preferred to listen rather than be listened to. This was another of his favorite Twain quotes: "Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." But he was also easy to underestimate because he tended to underestimate himself. He would have been amazed, genuinely amazed, by the outpouring of love and admiration that has poured into our family over the past week. And there's enough of my father in me to amaze me, too. My friends, some of whom I thought barely knew Dad, called or texted from as far away as Vienna and Taipei to say that my dad changed their lives. life for the better. My oldest friend, who is now a mountaineer and nature photographer, amazed me by saying that he might never become...... middle of paper......and Bailey couldn't see in the movie It's A Wonderful Life. George Bailey considered himself a very ordinary man. And because he was a man of great intellect and potential, he sometimes saw his ordinary life as a kind of failure. It was only when the angel pulled him out of his life and showed him the deep connections between his life and every other life in his community that he was finally able to see himself for the hero he was. My father was a George Bailey. And just as George's friends would come together and empty their pockets for him when he was in trouble, all of his friends would come together to celebrate his life. I just wish he had seen it, because he would never have believed it.