Read time: 8 min.

My dad died fifteen years ago today. I’d been batting around writing something formal to mark the occasion, but trying to compress his life into something tidy would require several volumes, a legal team, and a slew of affidavits to verify the most unbelievable parts. Dad was a story, or a series of them; layered, contradictory, and enormous. I’m not the raconteur that he was, but I’ll give it a shot with one of my favorite memories.

Dan Shideler was a lot. Among other things, Dad was an award-winning musician, a composer, a writer, an editor, and a widely-known expert in the field of firearms. He lived by the philosophy that anything worth doing was worth doing to excess! When I was a kid, that was both thrilling and scary. As a young adult, I came to realize that that Dad’s attitudes were not particularly sustainable.

By the time I was nineteen or twenty, Dad wasn’t doing great. I’d drive up to his house in Goshen every now and then and accompany him to the doctor. Neither of us believed in heading straight home, so we’d drift the backroads in search of lunch. Not just any lunch, of course; the next incredible one. After all, anything worth doing was worth doing to excess.

Dad and I shared an unwavering love of Mexican food. You know who else does? The Amish. They can’t get enough of it! One of our favorite spots was a cinderblock hole-in-the-wall in Topeka called El Zorrito. It was always shoulder-to-shoulder with Amish tradesmen, but Dad would stride in like he owned the place. More often than not, he’d loudly inform the staff that we were itinerant food critics passing through. For reasons I still don’t understand, no one ever challenged him. After all, everything worth doing…

One afternoon, Dad and I were heading back from Lutheran Hospital in Fort Wayne. I’m not sure why, but he was dressed like a riverboat gambler with a vest and tie. Who the hell wears that to the doctor’s office? Somewhere in LaGrange or Noble County, he spotted it- a brightly painted building tucked into a small town like Wolcottville. It was the kind of place you miss if you blink, but Dad slammed on the brakes like he’d just discovered the X for buried treasure. “Mexican,” he said as he pointed towards the restaurant. He was sure of it. 

We entered, but something seemed off. Dad looked at me, and I looked at him. Neither of us said a word as we were led to a table. We each ordered a Diet Pepsi, then the truth hit us all at once as we opened our menus: meatloaf. Manhattans. Country-fried steak. Then in bold, unmistakable print across the front of the thing, The Old Mill.

I turned. A wagon wheel leaned in the corner. Mason jars lined a shelf. Clapboard walls made the room feel less like a taqueria and more like a rustic cabin. Dad and I slowly raised our eyes from our menus and locked onto each other in shared horror. “What do we do?” Dad whispered. “I don’t know,” I whispered back. 

I didn’t know it at the time, but we had ourselves a moment there. I may have technically been an adult, but I wasn’t the adult in the room- not with Dan Shideler, and not really ever. This was the first time he’d ever turned to me for counsel, and I didn’t know what to do. My brain turned into baked beans.

To be fair, the food looked fine. Under normal circumstances I probably would’ve ordered something smothered in gravy and called it a day! Unfortunately, this wasn’t normal. We were there for Mexican food, and what turned out to be the Old Mill was a full-blown betrayal of our mission.

Suddenly, Dad’s eyes went wide. He scanned the homespun room, leaned in to slip me his keys, and whispered, “Go out and start the car. Don’t draw attention to yourself.” I nodded, as if that were a perfectly reasonable thing to be asked after just being seated at a restaurant.

I stood, walked calmly to the door, and stepped out into the Indiana daylight as Dad peeled some bills from his wallet to pay for our drinks. The Beetle fired up and I sat inside trying to look like someone familiar with the logistics of operating a getaway car.

A second later, the door burst open. Out came my dad- tie flapping and vest catching the wind- with the urgency of a man who had just committed a robbery. He dove into the passenger seat.

“Go! Go! Go! Go!” Dad bellowed. I didn’t need to be told twice! Gravel spitting behind us from the turbo, we peeled out onto State Road 9 like we were fleeing a felony instead of a menu. Somewhere behind us, I’m sure a very confused waitress stood there holding two fresh Diet Pepsis in an attempt to reconstruct the scene. With Dad, even leaving the wrong restaurant wasn’t just an exit. It was worthy of excess.

For better or worse, that was my dad: forever chasing something that he thought might be better, and fully prepared to execute an escape if he thought the situation called for it. If there was a taco within a ten-mile radius, the two of us weren’t going to stick around to negotiate with some mashed potatoes! Fortunately, we found our way back to El Zorrito. We regrouped like harrowed survivors of something that very much hadn’t gone according to plan.

Dad and I never quite figured out how The Old Mill managed to pull one over on us, but we laughed about it anyway as we marveled at how the joint somehow outfoxed two self-appointed, road-tested, restaurant critics such as ourselves. Fortunately, it didn’t matter- not long after, Dad invited me up to lunch at Elkhart’s El Maguey on a Sunday. I was ready to drive up until some last-minute overtime became available at the stupid call center I worked at. I phoned him to apologize that I couldn’t make it, and we talked for a while in normal conversation, the kind you assume you’ll get to have again.

I’m sad to say that Dad and I didn’t get that chance since he died later that night. Dad and my stepmom were watching the Sci-Fi channel when Karen slipped away to grab another can of Diet Pepsi. When she came back, Dad was dead in his chair of a heart attack. I still have the pipe that shattered when he collapsed.

“Shocked” doesn’t even begin to cover how the news hit me late that night. Even after seeing him laid out all purple at the funeral home, some stubborn part of me kept expecting him to walk back in like nothing had happened. In some ways, I still do: every now and then, I’ll spot an orange Beetle out on the road and feel a quick jolt of recognition. Maybe it’s him, still out chasing backroads, still deciding to swing by. Of course, it never is. Just as quickly, I’m pulled back to reality. In my case, everything worth remembering is worth remembering to excess.

Dad was fifty when he died, an age that felt impossibly far away when I was a kid but excessively close now. Time has softened some of the sharper edges of losing him, but it hasn’t pushed Dad very far away. He still shows up in small, unexpected ways- in a passing joke with my brother, in a rebuke to my brother-in-law, in a detour down a back road, in dreams and shared struggles, and in the urge to go somewhere new just because it’s there.

I have plenty of memories with my dad, but they’re hard to put into words since I was too busy living them to stop and record. What’s stayed with me most isn’t any single moment, but his constant pull toward something else. Even now, I find myself following his instinct by chasing the possibility of something better, even when I’m not entirely sure where the road leads.

Aside from every character trait I can ascribe from my dad, maybe that’s the real inheritance- not Dad’s excess itself, but the motion. The willingness to go, to try, and to lean into the moment a little harder than necessary. I don’t always get it right, but every now and then, I hear that voice again -“Go! Go! Go!” For a second, it feels like he’s still riding shotgun. I look around for a Beetle, though, and there’s none to be found.

I miss my dad.