NOTE: I've been busy chasing my son around, so this week you get an encore of my homage to the best dad on earth ... next to your own, of course.

I've long believed that no one has a "normal" childhood, and that's actually a pretty good thing. We all get our share of weird family rituals, goofy parental behavior and just flat unexplainable occurrences over the course of our rugrat years, and that helps prepare us for the curveballs adult life is so fond of tossing just when we're expecting a fat one down the middle of the plate.

For me, baseball was one of the first indications that I had been gifted with a dad who was weirder than most. But first, a little background.

My dad is possessed of an odd set of credentials. His first college schooling came at Kings Point Merchant Marine Academy, and he kept the second mate's license he earned there active for decades, even during his university career. He knew that if the college biz ever dried up, he could always find a ship in need of his services.

But the thing most people know about him is that he's got a doctorate in English, specifically 18th century British literature, from Rice University. Rice is no slouch of a school, even if some of the students do occasionally feel compelled to run around the campus naked and one of the highlights of the social calendar is the Night of Decadence party. When we first lived in Houston, when I was in middle school, he was once offered the physician's discount at a local pharmacy because of the "Dr." title before his name on the prescription. He refused it, and I didn't realize until years later that I'd learned something from that experience about not allowing people to assume you're something you're not, even if it's to your benefit.

Before Houston, though, we lived in Philadelphia, and I was a rabid fan of the Phillies. The highlight of my sports-fan life was 1980, when Mike Schmidt, Greg Luzinski, Steve Carlton and some guy named Pete Rose stomped the Kansas City Royals to win the World Series. To many adult fans, the most memorable thing about that series was George Brett's much-discussed case of hemorrhoids, but I was barely conscious of such hilarity.

My dad was working for Gulf Oil at the time, and he was very much an office guy ... or so I thought until the first time he took me to a Phillies game. Out of the blue one evening, he told me we were taking in the game the next day, that I was actually going to be in the same building with my diamond heroes.

Once we settled in our seats down the first-base line, I saw a completely different person occupy my dad's body. He was animated, bouncing out of his seat to holler and shout instructions to the players along with the rest of the rabid fans. He explained fine points of the game to me, taught me how to watch the base coaches flash signs and in general added fuel to what was already a furnace of sports frenzy.

The next memorable moment of weirdness came after my folks divorced, and Dad and I were apartment-hunting in Houston. He decided to reconnect with his nautical self and take me sailing. He rented a two-man sailboat on Clear Lake, and away we went. Now understand that Dad had spent most of his shipboard life on things like tankers that were three football fields long and took several miles to turn, speed up or slow down. Thus, he can be forgiven for the fact that we were just over one football field away from the dock before he tried to tack, swung the boom and capsized us neatly.

To add insult to injury, the water wasn't even deep enough for the boat to completely turn turtle. It fell over sideways and the top 3 or 4 feet of the mast and mainsail jammed in the rank muck at the bottom of the lake.

It took the help of a couple of smirking windsurfers standing on the keel board to right the boat, and as Dad climbed back over the gunwale a softball-sized glop of muck separated itself from the sail and landed right on his noggin. It was at that point that the owner of the rental service began bellowing from the end of the dock that he wanted his boat back, and that our two-hour rental was over.

I fully expected to see the fearsome Dad Volcano at this point, especially given the fact that his Kings Point class ring had gone to the bottom in his cigarette pouch. Imagine my pre-adolescent shock when my dad, bastion of rationality and normal behavior, began to laugh like a court jester on a caffeine jag. He let loose with the sort of belly laugh that comes directly from the soul, and soon I joined him until we were both holding onto the mast for dear life, unable to stand unaided, as more bits and globs of muck rained down with every breath of breeze.

In later years, on the frequent occasions I've been faced with a screwup of such monstrous proportions, of my own creation, I've discovered that ability to laugh in the face of disaster and reveled in it, often much to the consternation of those around me. It's an ability I wouldn't trade for all the gold in Fort Knox.

Dad remarried, and while my stepmother is now just about the best friend I've got on this plane of existence, back then we were at it hammer-and-tongs on a just-about-daily basis. Any weird behavior on Dad's part was committed out of my view. However, on graduation night, while the usual family-and-neighbors gathering was completely sucking the fun out of the event, a friend stopped by with an offer to take me to my very first viewing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."

Not only did my pops enthusiastically assent to the adventure, he enlisted my visiting sister's help in outfitting me properly with toilet paper, squirtgun, rice, etc. He knew she was experienced from her time at LSU.

It turned out to be one of the greatest nights of my life to date.

Of course, now that I'm older and living out of Texas, I don't get to see Dad as often as I'd like. But he's still plenty weird. How many men in their mid-70s do you know who do 150 pushups every morning, ride their bikes miles a day and keep up a garden with a couple hundred rose bushes? I just hope I'm that kind of weird when I'm his age.

But of course now I've got a more pressing job. I've got a new son of my own, and I've got to get to work on being his weird dad.

Fortunately, I had good training.

Got a question? Comment? Heaps of praise? Drop me a line, anytime!