My dad was a failure—in a good way

Like many people, my dad has a lot of set pieces—little speeches he rolls out from time to time that are polished by repetition. They are not at all conversational. They're more like mini-performances. They pretty much beg for applause. And you do feel like clapping when he's done.

He's a retired engineer, and in addition to encouraging every single human being from the age of birth to dotage to go to Caltech (cheapest engineering school in the country according to the latest Kiplinger's!), he likes to talk about how engineering is all about failure. Like buzzards, engineers flock to a disaster—a flood, an earthquake, a building collapse—because engineering is essentially a war against the forces of nature—wind, water, fire, earth movement—and the only way to win the war, or at least your next battle, is to be there for the post-mortems.

That mini-lecture inevitably leads to an instruction for my dad's memorial. He says he wants to have a basket and a pad of paper at his service, with a sign reading "Second Opinions." His friends (and enemies) can write down his failures and place them in the basket, and they will be read aloud.

So what are his failures? Well, for starters, he flunked out of Lehigh his sophomore year. That led him to enlist in the army. In the army, he was repeatedly assigned KP duty as punishment for going AWOL to search for gold in the desert (another failure: he never found any). In fact, his penchant for disappearing resulted in a demotion to private a week after he was promoted to corporal. Though he never again made it beyond PFC, he ended up being a pretty good cook. In Europe, when ordered to cover his officer while the lieutenant went ahead to scout out the territory, a tiny fellow in a German uniform rose up through a trapdoor between my dad and the lieutenant, and my dad fired—but failed to kill the enemy soldier, who turned out to be a 14-year-old kid. Later, my dad failed the state structural-engineering test on his first try. Then the roof of a bowling alley he'd designed collapsed because of diseased timber. Then he was defeated in his run for the state senate on a fair-housing platform. And so forth.

If nothing else, his failures have a zestier flavor than his successes: the endless drone of accomplishments, military medals, design awards, prizes that somehow seem meaningless and even dehumanizing in the face of death. No?