Nikki Yeager

Sometimes I get antsy. Who doesn't? 

Sometimes I need to jump around, move, change things up. 

Why not? 

More often than not I start breaking down without ample vacation time, constant changes in setting, big life events and so on. 

So goes my life and I love every second of it.

But when I hear the comment "you've done so much," I can't help but thank my insatiable desire for change. I would'nt have the accomplishments under my belt that I do if I was content with monotony (no matter how much I wished at certain times that I'd  be ok going to the same office every day or I'd be happy living in the same place every year or I'd be content showing up to the same campus for 10am classes).

For all of that I can thank my dad- the original family vegabond. 

Anyone who hasn't had the stories, I thought today would be a good time to share  

If you ask my dad about stories when he was younger he'll chuckle, turn a little red and walk away. Sometimes he'll share a small insignificant detail and then say "eh that's really all" and he giggles. But sometimes I get the goods. Not all of them and not with full disclosure. But I get the basics. 

It goes something like this. 

He hopped freight trains from PA to Cali where at some point he had friends who grew pot in their dorm room. He then went to live in a tent (seriously, he lived there.) and headed off from there to Vail where he worked as a maid for free ski passes. His other man-maid-friends took him up to the backside of the mountains and they'd jump off the side of the road and extreme ski through the forest to the bottom of the untamed mountain where they'd hop in a passing taxi to take them back to their car. 

You'd think it'd stop there but it doesn't. 

He worked in some sort of mine, had a job lighting the Christmas lights in his town with a giant stick (his little chicken legs would have to run him from one light to the next with a pole vault sized wooden rod in his hand), lived with ex-convicts (who may or may not have been planning another heist of some sort in his living room), had a motorcycle, grew a beard, ran wild across the country. 

But I was always kept in the [semi]dark about his young and crazy days. 

Since I've known him he's been a grey haired old man who reads the newspaper every day and never takes his shoes off. Even when we're inside. 

He was a stay at home dad when I was little, taking full responsibility of volleyball dinners, school meetings, housework and cooking. He baked cookies (and then ate the whole pan), he did my laundry before I learned how, he took on carpool duty and shuttled my friends back and forth from the mall, from track practice and from school with the prowess of a seasoned soccer mom.

And he never yelled at me. Just gave me 'the look' which was more disappointment than anything and used his 'upset voice' (it wasn't angry... more sad than anything) to talk to me when I did something wrong. And boy would that voice make me cry. For HOURS! ... in the privacy of my room. 

So I never thought about his wanderlust and, at times, ridiculousness, except as a vague point of fascination. 

However, as I get older I realize his wandering ways didn't disappear when he decided to go domestic. They're still alive and well. His restlessness appears in my hatred for 9-5 jobs in a single office every day. His need for adventure manifests itself in my snap decisions to take a plane to Cambodia, to the Bahamas, to Japan. And even his slight introverted tendencies come to life in my quest for individual adventures, solo excursions and long walks with no one but myself to keep my company. 

The fact that I'm sitting here thinking of my 21 days of my 21st Birthday and getting the urge to take off immediately...my leg is jiggling and I'm spending time alternating between work and looking up flights.

Which reminds me of those characteristics that made my dad who he was when he was younger. And who he still is inside. 

It's quite obvious I'm his daughter through and through.