Growing up, all my friends had a father except for me. In the essay "All Over but the Shoutin'  Rick Braggs has the same issue. Sure everyone has a father but not every child knows him personally. I only went and visited my father two time year, if I was lucky. It would only be for a couple days at a time. He was never really a father to me. Even after being with him for a couple days, he was still a complete stranger to me. I always pondered what it would be like to have a father. Everyone in my family never had anything nice to say about him. I never really listened to them because I didn't want to believe that he was a bad person. One day I finally got to experience what having a father was like. Ever since I can remember, it has always just been my mom and I. There was never a strong father figure in my life since mine left when I was just three years old. He packed up his bags and left, like my mother and I were nothing. I didn't know my father, I didn't know what kind of food he liked, his favorite sports team, his favorite color, or if he ever loved my mom and I. I don't remember ever making him father's day gifts or cards in grade school, or feeling the warmth of his arms around me. I was too young to remember anything about him. To me he was a mere shadow, a fuzzy memory that never seems to fail to creep into the back of my mind. In Braggs essay he says "I thought that the man I would see would be the trim, swaggering, high-toned little rooster of a man who stared back at me from the pages of my mother's photo album, the young solider clowning around in Korea, the arrow-straight, good looking boy who posed beside my mother back before the fields and mop handle and the rest of it took her looks . I do remember looking through photo albums that my grandma had and seeing my father. He looked just like a normal guy. I would always wonder about what he looked like but I could only look at the photos of him. In the photos he looked very happy and joyful. I wonder what exactly happened that made him leave. I reme