BUENOS AIRES – Jorge Marcelo Ramia was talking as he, his friend Lucia Garcia Labat and I were in a taxi cab and coming from the two baseball fields he had built in a park on the edge of the city.

I listened as Ramia shared his hopes for baseball in Argentina. He was saying how optimistic he was that baseball here, in the heart of futbol country, would prosper. Ramia said he’s made the success of baseball a measure of his success in life.

He was in the middle of a sentence when, as if on cue, a song blared through the radio. I asked the driver to turn up the volume. I shook my head in disbelief as this ‘87 song by Starship played. For no song could have fit into our conversation better than these lyrics:

And we can build this thing together, stand in stone forever, nothing’s gonna stop us now.

Surely, nothing’s gonna stop Jorge Marcelo Ramia from building baseball in Argentina.

“Yes, he is crazy,” Garcia said in her halting English. “My friends don’t understand. Why are you doing this?”

Ramia called his obsession with seeing baseball thrive in Argentina his mission. He called his effort to ensure it does “the project.”

In fact, it is his life. All of what Ramia does these days is tied to baseball. He’s abandoned his work with tennis and basketball — sports that allowed him to travel the world to promote. He might still have been with one of those sports had Ramia not gotten hooked on baseball.

He’s hooked — badly. He has his reasons.

At 51, he never had kids of his own. But he loves kids. Always has loved ‘em. He’s gotten pleasure out of seeing them enjoy sports.

Maybe in them, he said, he’s living out his youth again. Maybe, he said, he’s enjoying things in their lives that, for whatever reason, he wasn’t able to enjoy in his.

In his boyhood, Ramia wasn’t able to enjoy baseball. In the 1950s and ‘60s, nobody played baseball here. Nobody. He didn’t fall in love with the sport until five years ago.

He fell hard for it.

Baseball has become Ramia’s mistress. He spends most of his days with her — and a good chunk of his money, too.

“The project — it drives him,” Garcia said as the taxi rolled through Buenos Aires.

The project drives him each day to the two ballparks he’s built. It drives him to talk to city fathers about building more ballparks. It drives him to recruit like-minded people who share his vision of what baseball can be in a country that worships futbol.

“We can see everything,” he said of baseball’s future here. “Some people can see nothing. That is not my problem.”

He does have a problem — don’t all dreamers, though? — in trying to grow the game here. For it will take Ramia’s undying commitment and help from others to see his dream become a reality.

That reality is, he said, a steady flow of Argentine talent to the Majors.

First, Ramia has a more modest objective: seeing a team of Argentine boys at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa.

From those boys will come the Major Leaguers. From those men in the bigs will come fulfillment for Ramia, who will have seen his hard work produce the results he’s sought. But those results won’t occur overnight. They’ll take time.

It will happen. Ramia’s certain of it. It will happen sooner than many people might think. Ramia’s certain of that, too.

Maybe tomorrow, maybe next month or maybe next year or maybe in the next two or three or four years, he’ll be able to reflect on his beginning days of “the project” and see something that’ll carry his imprint.

On his deathbed, he’ll know that he’s left something good behind for Argentines, he said. It’ll all be reflected on his tombstone, Ramia said.

“When the moment arises,” he said, “it will say: a warrior, a dreamer and stupid.”

Let’s say I’m 25 years old. (Play along, please.) Let’s say I’ve put in three or four years at my local newspaper and I’m ready to move on. On December 17, 2010, searching for the next adventure, I go to JournalismJobs.com. There I see the Helena Independent Record is looking for a sports editor. The salary range is $30,000 to $35,000.

The newspaper’s ad reads: “The Independent Record, an award-winning 15,000-circulation daily in state capital Helena, Montana, seeks a dynamic sports editor with excellent leadership, writing and design skills to lead its four-person staff in this sports powerhouse city in the heart of the Northern Rockies.”

I’m thinking, Montana?

“When you aren’t working, enjoy the myriad of recreational opportunities Helena has to offer in hiking, mountain biking, fly-fishing, skiing, boating and many more.”

I’m thinking, They’re selling fly-fishing?

The ad also says: “This fast-paced newspaper needs a self-starter who can make an immediate contribution to achieving a high level of excellence in the print and online products with compelling sports page design, enterprising sports news and feature reports, and multimedia presentation at helenanir.com.”

Better, sounds ambitious.

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It was an unusual venue for watching a Super Bowl. I was in Buenos Aires in 2008, surrounded mainly by transplanted Americans as the New England Patriots and New York Giants treated television viewers to one of the most memorable NFL games in history.

I had gone to Shoeless Joe’s El Alamo, a sports bar for expats in the Recoleta neighborhood, with a gang of people I had befriended during the month I spent in Argentina. I met them all at a language school I was attending, a place I went in hopes of learning Spanish. Most of the people I met were there for the same purpose, although I’m guessing they had much more success in mastering Spanish than I did.

But our language lessons didn’t fill the days. At tops, these classes lasted two hours, which gave all of us the rest of the summer day to explore Buenos Aires and experience the Argentine culture.

We didn’t hesitate to do so.

For we found plenty to experience in a city that has earned itself the nickname of “the Paris of South America.” If Paris is anything like Buenos Aires, I want to experience it as well. I found it hard to believe that Paris isn’t the “Buenos Aires of Europe.”

In the world of big cities, no place can possibly have the feel, pulse and warmth of Buenos Aires. The city is a mix of cultures – a racial melting pot in its truest sense that has stitched the ethnic heritages of diverse groups into a colorful tapestry. The words that people see on the Statue of Liberty could well fit on the “Obelisk” that serves as the North Star, a beacon guiding visitors through downtown Buenos Aires.

The city is more than sports bars, frightening cab rides and a gathering spot for foreigners. It is a place filled with history and style – a city with a swashbuckler’s flair. Buenos Aires has its quirks, too.

What city of more than 10 million people doesn’t?

Think I’m kidding? Well, try riding the rickety “A” line of the Subte (about 30 cents) to Plaza de Mayo-Carabobo and you’ll see a side of Buenos Aires that’s as gritty as any area of in Manhattan or Mumbai.

And like Manhattan and Mumbai, Buenos Aires has its distinct neighborhoods – even more of them than Manhattan. For Buenos Aires has a large footprint, one that stretches east and west, north and south.

Want to see colorful tenements, rubble and the hard-edged existence of the prideful “porteños”?

Then visit La Boca.

Fancy the nightlife?

Hit Las Canitas, Palermo and Zona Centro neighborhoods. You will  find everything there from the zoo to tango dancing in the streets to theaters and world-class museums.

How about good eats?

The cuisine in Buenos Aires ranges from Armenian to Indian to Thai, although if you’re looking for a Wendy’s, a White Castles or a Burger King, keep on lookin’. I didn’t find a one, but who travels outside the United States in hopes of eating on the cheap at a McDonald’s?

People come to Argentina for the meat. Argentina is steak country, and Morton’s or Peter Luger’s would do its diners a favor if it could offer a steak as tender and as succulent as you’d find in Buenos Aires.

Yet what makes Buenos Aires what the city is are the porteños, the Argentine people. They enjoy their lives, and they spend more time living it than thinking about it.

And that’s as much as anything else the reason they helped fill El Alamo two years ago watch this decidedly American sport. The Super Bowl has long been a signature event for Americans; the game is, however, simply a mere curiosity to Argentines.

But there the Argentines were this summer night, shoulder to shoulder in El Alamo with foreigners, watching on HDTV a game that didn’t resemble their football in any way. Yet they seemed to enjoy the game as much as the foreigners did.

Not that the Argentines understood the game. I doubt they did. But pour enough pints of Quilmas or Scotch ale down a man’s throat, and even curling might have its appeal.

On the eve of another Super Bowl, I expect the porteños will be bellying up to the wooden bar inside El Alamo, laughing and drinking and smiling and celebrating with their foreign friends.

I long to be there with them.

The era of instant communication has brought with it two overriding verities: We have the ability to let loose our thoughts practically the instant we have them. And we have the corresponding responsibility to keep our inner editor on standby alert during every waking minute.

Unfortunately, and to our peril, the second occasionally fails to keep up with the first. That is true of anyone who has access to an email account or a cellphone, and it is especially true for those of us who make our living as communicators. Once it’s out there, it’s OUT there — and no amount of attempted deletions, apologies, excuses or modern technology can take it back.

That sad fact led to a painful decision Plain Dealer editors had to make last week.

Tony Grossi, who had covered the Cleveland Browns at this newspaper for roughly two decades, was removed from the beat on Tuesday by Editor Debra Adams Simmons, Managing Editor Thom Fladung and Sports Editor Roy Hewitt after an ill-considered Tweet went unintentionally viral.

Grossi had typed a message, which he termed “a smart-(aleck) remark to a colleague,” that called Browns owner Randy Lerner “a pathetic figure, the most irrelevant billionaire in the world.”

But instead of sending a text message only to its intended recipient, he hit the wrong button and sent it out to his 15,000-plus Twitter followers.

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What is there to say about Fausto Carmona or, as we know him now, about Roberto Heredia?

Well, guess there’s plenty to say, right?

To start, this game of scamming the immigration system has to cease in baseball. It’s not as if Heredia is the first Latin player to slip into this country with somebody else’s identity. Heredia surely won’t be the last one, either.

For the system in Latin and South American countries that allows Major League ballclubs to find, hide and nurture baseball talent is as corrupt as the mortgage industry.

In the past, we’ve given such misdeeds a wink. It’s OK; no one’s hurt. We let this happens anymore. In the post-9/11 climate, we must demand honesty from every man who crosses the U.S. borders. Each man must be who he’s claiming he is.

No more Carmonas/Heredias – ever.

Now, nothing here is meant as an indictment of Latinos. Anybody with American citizenship can understand why other people want to enter the United States. People have been trying to slip into this country for the better part of 200 years. Most of those years were wide open to unregulated immigration. No more, though.

The country is short of jobs and resources, and the opportunities that used to be the envy of the world don’t exist as they used to. Men or women who cross into this country illegally and land a job are taking jobs from someone who has a right to it.

They don’t deserve sympathy for breaking the law; they deserve are loathing.

Yet we should not be in the business of scooping up people like Carmona/Heredia and shipping them home without some sort of due process. America, after all, is not a country that is absent a bleeding heart.

America is not, however, a country that can let other nations view it as a fool’s paradise. It might still be the wealthiest country on the planet, but it is not a country whose wealth can accommodate everybody. The consensus among some is that unlawful immigrants must go home and can’t return, even if they throw a fastball 95 mph.

That’s a Draconian approach, though it’s an approach not hard to understand. But a better approach is this: offer amnesty.

Tell every illegal alien – OK, the term is unseemly to some people, so what? – he has one shot: step forward, admit he’s here unlawfully, pay a small fine or do community service of some kind and work toward citizenship.

Look at it as if it’s a no-tax day. One shot … that’s all each of them gets. Set a deadline for all illegal aliens, and if they miss it, they face the consequences.

If caught, they go back to their homeland; they go home and can never reenter the United States, even if they happen to be the finest pitcher on the planet.

What such a strategy shows is the compassionate side of America. What this policy also shows, however, is that Americans will never tolerate lawbreakers like Heredia. They might understand the reasons for breaking the law, but never, ever can they live with people who, when given the second chance, ignore the laws that govern.

CLEVELAND — Joe Paterno was the Lion King. His reign lasted from the 1960s until he was fired at Penn State in November.

There won’t be another quite like him, due to Penn State’s geographic isolation, his success and his astonishing longevity with the Nittany Lions in a win-now world. No big-city media organizations focused on the Nittany Lions on a daily basis. Central Pennsylvania was almost Paterno’s personal fief, to run as he saw fit.

In 2004, after a 4-7 record, Paterno’s second straight losing season, former Penn State president Gordon Spanier went to Paterno’s house to tell him it was time to retire. Paterno told Spanier to take a hike.

Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee made himself the butt of jokes when he quipped in the midst of the memorabilia sale scandal that he worried Jim Tressel might dismiss him. But when Ohio State’s reputation was at stake, Gee forced Tressel out, albeit by changing his resignation to a “retirement” with a sweet benefit package.

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The clock read :11 Sunday, but the New England Patriots and their faithful had already begun their celebration. They were cheering wildly as Billy Cundiff, as reliable a kicker as a NFL team can have, sent a game-tying field goal sailing wide to the right.

Cundiff’s missed kick gave the Patriots a 23-20 win over the Baltimore Ravens, and the win sent New England to yet another Super Bowl, an annual ritual for Tom Brady and his bellicose coach Bill Belichick.

Yet, in many ways, their victory was less about Brady and Belichick and more about another quarterback: Joe Flacco.

Now, nobody in America can compare Flacco to a Hall-of-Fame quarterback like Brady. Not even Flacco’s teammates were foolish enough to do so. In fact, safety Ed Reed had singled Flacco out for his postseason mistakes in the run-up to this AFC championship game.

Whatever criticisms he had of Flacco, the aging Reed had no choice but to temper them after Flacco performed well enough to bring the Ravens a victory. He didn’t just manage a game for the bone-rattling Baltimore defense, long the signature of Ravens teams; Flacco went out and tried to win the game.

And win it Flacco should have. Don’t blame him for this loss.

While his performance was hardly flawless, Flacco showed pluck and grit. He had the AFC title won – won – when he hit wide receiver Lee Evans in the hands deep into the New England end zone in the game’s closing seconds.

But Evans dropped Flacco’s pass. He dropped it and then put the game’s fortunes on Cundiff’s shoulders — rather, on Cundiff’s usually reliable foot.

Well, to bank on a placekicker is as dicey as banking on Flacco, at least on the Joe Flacco who had quarterbacked the Ravens in their recent postseason disappointments.

The Ravens did, though. They figured Cundiff, who had been 16-for-16 in postseason field goals in his career, could boot a 30-plus yarder through the uprights. He couldn’t win it with this one kick, but he could ensure the Ravens had a chance to win the game in overtime.

They were willing to settle for that; they were willing to trust Flacco once more to deliver what he had been unable to deliver: a trip to the Super Bowl.

It wasn’t in their destiny or their luck, and the Ravens knew as much as they stood quietly on the sidelines with :11 on the clock and watched it tick toward :00.

Those numbers could serve to define what has been the Flacco era with the Ravens. It has been a postseason zero for whatever reason.

For the first time, however, Joe Flacco proved he’s no journeyman quarterback. He’s a man capable of playing big in big moments. Perhaps no moment in Flacco’s seven-year career had been bigger than this moment against the Patriots. No moment in his career had been close to this one either, but he handled the pressure of it like a quarterback capable of winning a Super Bowl.

A field goal that sailed wide right will prevent Flacco from proving he can thi
s year.

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No matter how often you hear about the sexual abuse scandal at Penn State, no matter how deep into the scandal newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times dig, none of it makes sense.

How could so many adults – educated adults, too; men and women with doctorates and law degrees — be so blind to so much wrong?

What the Penn State scandal has shown those who chronicle sports for their livelihood is that what passes as intercollegiate sports is as corrupt, as misguided and as deserving of harsh scrutiny as pimps and politicians. Dare to blink once, and you will open your eyes and see the world around has been shaken and stirred like a martini. What you thought you had first seen you didn’t see at all.

That’s what happens when society allows sports to play too large a role on college campuses. Just try to explain how football and basketball coaches and their mega-million contracts get a free run of the place. They cloak themselves in splendor while an assistant professor in the most taxing of academic disciplines survives on a pauper’s wage.

Talk all you want about how much athletic programs contribute to the vibrancy of the university community, about how much money big-time sports bring in and about what a warm, touchy-feely experience sports provides, but you can’t dismiss the corruption and the excesses sports leaves in its wake.

Nobody on a college campus is as untouchable as a football coach who wins twice as often as he loses.

That was apparent in Happy Valley until former assistant coach John Sandusky and the sex scandal he’s linked to exploded like a hydrogen bomb. At some point, even the feckless Penn State Board of Trustees could not defend its iconic coach Joe Paterno.

As The Times analysis pointed out, trustees decided straightaway that the university’s president had to go. What to do with the popular Paterno, however … ahhh, that was an altogether different question for them. They feared rushing to decide Paterno’s fate, for they had political considerations to weigh. Plus, you don’t remove the “Coach Paternos of the Sports World” without a lot of handwringing.

Handwringing is a code word for timidity, which is bountiful in the halls of academe and in a college athletic director’s office.

Banks, brokerage houses and AIG are too big to fail, and college coaches are too big to fire.

And that’s the problem.

One egregious scandal doesn’t seem to tilt the sport landscape, because if that were so, one scandal after another would not be making gigantic headlines online and in dailies or feeding Twitter.

Penn State and Paterno replaced Ohio State and coach Jim Tressel as the scandal of the month. Now, Syracuse is making its run at grabbing that infamy. No one can be certain what school will next be in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

What is a certainty, though, is that unless alumni, fans, trustees, university presidents, athletic directors and the media put intercollegiate sports in their proper perspective, football and basketball coaches in the elite conferences will reign like despots over campus life forever.

He was a man for all seasons: a poet, a philosopher, a political lightning rod, an activist, an athlete, a brother, a husband, a father and an American classic.

Few men held as many labels as Muhammad Ali did. But, then again, few men have lived a life like Ali’s. He’s the quintessential macho male, as easy to define as the “Big Bang” theory.

I suspect that’s how Ali, who turns 70 today, might want it, too. After all, a man who’s led as public a life as he has might want, in the declining days of his life, to have left his admirers and his critics as confused about whom he is at 70 as he was at 30.

A lot as happened to Ali since his 30s, of course. His life has rolled down hill faster than people would want. He’s a shadow personality, a man sick and silent now. The vibrant figure of yesteryear, the man who challenged convention, who stood tall in the face of hatred and bigotry and who fought the forces aligned against him in the same way he fought Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman is long gone.

Yet if any black athlete stood as a symbol of the last half of the 20^th century, Ali was that athlete. He followed Jack Johnson in first 25 years of the century; Joe Louis and Jesse Owens in the next 25; and Jackie Robinson, Jim Brown and Arthur Ashe in the next 25 years.

The last 25 were Ali’s almost alone.

We seem to forget that what captivated us from the start was Ali’s elegance in the squared circle. Nobody had seen a boxer quite like him. Ali was part Sugar Ray Robinson, part Louis and a heavy helping of Johnson.

In a profession that celebrated fighters who hurt and didn’t mind being hurt, Ali halved that equation. He proved that a fighter can make a king’s wages and fill arenas if he avoids harm while exacting plenty of harm on the man whose face took the business end of Ali’s jabs.

For nearly 20 years, Ali was the most talked about athlete in sports. He was Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods and Pele and Beckham rolled into one. He had the charisma of Michael Jackson, the sex appeal of Marvin Gaye or Teddy Pendergast and a gift of gab that rivaled Malcolm X or Rev. Martin Luther King himself.  The talking heads on radio or TV had nothing on Ali — then and now.

“The Louisville Lip,” some men called him. They didn’t necessarily mean it as a compliment. To people who didn’t understand Ali, he was the worst kind of nigger. Brash, unapologetic and rich – oh, was Muhammad Ali rich – he could walk with royalty and not feel as if he had to bow to any king or queen, president or prime minister.

He was Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of WORLD.

No single title carried as much prestige as this one did. It has always rallied forces against it, particularly when the title falls in the hands of a black man. Not just any black man in Ali; a black man whose arrogance brought him as much criticism as it brought him praise.

He was the lone athlete in the world that no one was ambivalent toward. Either you loved Ali and his mighty mouth or you hated Ali in all his blackness.

But somewhere between this world of love and hate, Ali moved the two extremes closer to each other. By his final fight Dec. 11, 1981 – his “Drama in the Bahamas” against the nondescript Trevor Berbick – the 39-year-old Ali was the most beloved figure in sports.

His had been whirlwind ascent. Forgotten along the way were his comments about the Vietnam War; forgotten was Ali’s refusal to step forward and join the U.S. war effort; forgotten was his decision to cast his lot with the Black Muslims, a religious sect that whites – and some blacks – felt fueled hate.

Unforgettable, though, were Ali’s legendary fights with the late Joe Frazier; unforgettable was Ali’s rumble with Foreman; unforgettable was Ali’s verbal sparring matches with sportscaster Howard Cosell; and unforgettable was Ali’s globetrotting role as a goodwill ambassador. Ali brought men of different races and religions together in ways that popes and politicians, the prosperous, the powerful and the poor never could.

Ali’s ability to bridge those differences will be his enduring legacy. His magic in the ring will be what generations ahead will see on SportsCenter. To them, the flashy talk, the fancy dancing and the fast fists made Ali’s boast that he was the greatest ring true. What historians who chronicle the last half of the 20^th century will say is this: Muhammad Ali was a classic personality who defied labels, a public treasure as priceless as the Mona Lisa.

I wasn’t quite 10-years-old when my father, a man not prone to impulsive spending, decided my little brother Merlin and I had become serious enough about playing baseball that we deserved our own gloves.

For a couple of summers, he’d watched both of us rush off in the morning to play baseball with David, Bootsy, Peanut and other boys in the ‘hood. All had their own gloves. My father figured, I suppose now, that he’d make sure we had ones as well.

So off the three of us went to buy gloves. He took us to a Sears & Roebuck Co. store on the East Side of Cleveland and gave us free reign to pick whichever glove we liked. Merl, as we all called my brother, picked a small, cheap-looking glove. I picked a larger, Ted Williams model that was the second most expensive glove Sears sold.

It was, as many can attest to, love found in the oddest place.

But love it truly was — first love, too, although my older sister Ann had often teased me about having a crush on a little girl who lived around the corner when I was about 5.

Any affection a 5-year-old boy like me might have had for a girl had long waned by the time he’d reached 9½. Once the warmer days allowed us to play baseball deep into the afternoons, I found myself too preoccupied with baseball to waste my time on a girl.

From the moment my father bought that glove, I treated it like royalty. I lent it to nobody, and I wouldn’t even let my little brother touch it. I pampered that glove like a baby.

At the end of my first summer, I remember buying a tin of saddle soap and a tube of leather balm and rubbing both into the palm of my glove. At the end of that second summer of owning it, I did what I’d heard Major Leaguers did: I wedged a baseball into the palm of the glove and wrapped a string around it to help shape and soften the pocket.

Over that too-long Cleveland winter, I took the glove out now and then, untied the string I had around it, used more saddle soap and balm on its palm and then retied the whole package and stored the glove underneath my bed.

In the years ahead, as I started to put more time into sandlot baseball, I learned from older boys a better way of keeping the glove leather soft and supple: oil it.

Now, oil can mean a lot of things — vegetable, olive, motor. I doubt the folks who made gloves for Sears, Wilson or Rawlings recommended any of these oils. Nor, I suspect, did they recommend the oil I ended up using:  “3-In-One.”

Buying a big can of it, I lathered my glove with “3-In-One.” I put a ball inside, retied the glove with string and waited for the oil to dry.

Right away, I noticed that the “3-In-One” darkened the leather, made my glove weigh a half-ton and smell like … well, smell like heavy oil. It drowned the sweet aroma of leather. I wasn’t overly worried about that, because other boys I knew had done the same thing. Their gloves came out fine. So did mine, once the “3-In-One” dried.

That glove, shaped and crafted to fit my needs, served me well into my high school days. I treated it kindly from my first day of owning it to my last.

The last day came one spring day when I was in the 10^th grade and on the JV team [I was a decent ballplayer, nobody great, though]. Someone pried open my locker and stole the glove. I didn’t stress it. By then, the glove had served me for close to seven years. In the back of my mind, I’d always longed to replace it with a Wilson A2000. Now I had a reason to do so.

Wanting and buying an A2000 are two matters of a different sort, because a glove priced like a used car payment was beyond my means.

But I knew I needed another glove, so I settled for a lesser model Wilson, a glove that I used for intramural softball in college and in my softball days after Ohio State. At some point, I did buy a pricy A3000, a glove I have jammed into a metal file cabinet in my garage.

Yet the A2000 has never made my first glove disappear from my mind. Even before I graduated from Ohio State oh-so long ago, I found out what happened to it — or, rather, who had my first glove.

In my freshman year, I came home during Spring Quarter for a long weekend and went to see my old high school play ball. I noticed an infielder, a boy whom I knew from my sandlot days, had a glove that looked familiar. I walked up to him after the game and asked him could I see it.

He handed the glove to me, and I knew immediately it was my old Sears model. I asked him where he’d gotten it. He said he bought the glove off somebody. I held on to it for a while longer before handing it back. I told him that it wasn’t a big deal. Use it well, I remember vaguely telling him.

Maybe he did. For after high school, he stayed involved with city baseball. He eventually ended up as a high school coach. Did he still have my first glove? I can’t say.

I do know this: He never had the memories that I carried with me about that glove, a gift from my father that I valued as much as anything else tangible he gave me in life.