One time when he was 18, he was fishing and found a baby salamander someone had tried and failed to use as bait. It had a huge gash in its side and didn’t look like it would make it. He put it in the bucket he was going to put fish in and took it home, then performed “surgery” on the little guy to mend the gash. It couldn’t move, so my dad fed it and nursed it back to health until the gash was healed. Since he’d taken it in as a baby, it wasn’t equipped to stay alive in the wild, so he kept it in a giant aquarium next to his bed. It stayed alive until my sister was born six years later.

His dad took him deer hunting once when he was in middle school. They hunted all day and never saw a single deer. At the end of the day as the sun was setting, they found one, and my dad yelled at my grandpa not to shoot it because it didn’t deserve to die. He hasn’t been deer hunting since.

Two people I used to be best friends with don’t have stable parents. My dad takes them out for lunch and out fishing regularly, and even though I am not friends with either of them anymore, he still makes time for them as if they were his own kids.

Sometimes I catch him crying at videos of dogs on the internet.

One time he was crying and I asked him what was wrong and he gave me a hug and said there isn’t always a reason. I’ve held on to that.

He told me that if (if) he dies, he wants to die by being drowned in a horde of puppies because otherwise, what’s the point?

He makes sure to say “I love you” to my mom and me every day, because he once told me he never once heard it from his parents as a kid.

Saw my mom looking at a bird, so he found out what kind of bird it was and drew a picture of it for her.

Heard me crying after a hard day and brought me a box of milk duds, because even though I’m lactose intolerant, it was an occasion on which they were needed.