His childhood friends called him Dickie. His mother called him Richard, usually when he was in trouble. The Air Force called him Sergeant 18693432. His friends and the men he did business with called him Rick. His daughters' high school friends called him Captain Rick, because by then he was a sailor. Then the grandchildren came along, and "Captain Rick" was too big a mouthful for a toddler, so it got shortened to Cappy. For the past quarter century, that is who he was to all of us.

Cappy.

I met Jill in the summer of 1988. Early on, we traded stories about our families. She described her father as a man who left the house at six in the morning, drove to Taylorsville, and ran the finances for an international sportswear company. Strict. Buttoned down. A serious accountant who got home late.

I never met that man.

I'm not convinced he ever existed.

The fellow I knew was more Jimmy Buffett than Warren Buffett. He had the stress level of a basset hound.

Plenty of people talk about chucking it all and going sailing. Ninety-nine percent of them are just talking. Cappy did it. He pulled out his paper charts, loaded up his Island Packet sailboat, and he and his wife Joanna sailed away for the better part of two years. We'd get word from the Bahamas, or St. Somewhere, and hear about the characters they met in marinas and anchorages along the way. Jill and I called them the Pirates.

He eventually dropped anchor in Mobile Bay and started another career selling sailboats. He was good at it. He'd grumble about hosting sea trials and hauling prospects out on the water, but I always suspected that was the part he loved most.

Add it up and the man lived about five lives. Air Force. A degree in accounting. Twenty years in corporate finance. A couple of years living on a boat. Then twenty-five years as a boat broker, a good deal longer than the job everyone considered his real one.

Most people would call that a full life and leave it alone. Not Cappy. In his seventies he decided he needed one more career, so he started a band. He knew G, C, and D on a guitar and had never touched a bass, so naturally he taught himself bass, and that's pretty much all he talked about for the rest of his life. 

We should all be that obsessed with something new at seventy-five.

He was a storyteller, the way sailors and bass players tend to be. He'd sit our preschool-aged children down and tell them about his misadventures in the bars and bordellos of Juarez, Mexico across the border from his hometown of El Paso. There's a permanent crease in Jill's neck from the years she spent drawing a finger across her throat trying to get him to wrap it up. He never took the hint. He'd just keep rolling with inappropriate stories, happy as could be, while everyone else held their breath. Holleman watched with a little fear. Harrison watched with delight, waiting to see how far it would go.

He had opinions and no filter to slow them down. He could hold forth at full volume about illegal immigration while sitting in a Mexican restaurant, never understanding why the rest of us had slid down in our chairs. He was also a terrible cook. If you were ever served his enchilada surprise, the actual surprise was you didn't order enchiladas again for a decade.

I asked him for Jill's hand while we were standing at the pumps of a Shell station. He acted like men asked for his daughter's hand between regular and premium every day of the week. Didn't blink.

He never once acted his age. He died just a couple of months past his eightieth birthday, still living like a man in his twenties who happened to have better stories and a bass guitar. When his eyes were giving him fits, the doctor put him in an eyepatch. Most people would hate that. Cappy treated his like the pirate costume he'd waited his whole life to wear. He loved it.

He never met a stranger. By the time he walked out of the grocery store, he and the cashier were old friends. He was the life of the party, and more often than not the one who started it. He came by it honestly. His father was the same way. His daughter keeps the party tradition going.

Here's the part that sounds like a different man. As loose and carefree as he was, anybody in our family will tell you that when you needed honest, grown-up advice, you went to Cappy. I think he could be that carefree because nothing weighed on him. He was honest. He was good to people. He could lay his head on the pillow every night knowing exactly who he was. And he never missed a thing that mattered to the people he loved. Not a recital, not a soccer game, not a freezing-cold Friday night football game, his kids' or his grandkids'. Ever. Not one. He coached every one of them from the sidelines, whether anybody asked him to or not.

Cappy could not sit through a meal in one of my restaurants without informing everyone in the building that he was my father-in-law. The manager knew. The hostess knew. His server knew, and so did the table next to him, and probably the table next to them. He announced it like a man holding a winning lottery ticket. And here's the thing. I grew up without a father. The words "father-in-law" never fit Cappy. They were too small. For almost four decades, he was just my father. From that first summer, he folded me in like I'd been his all along, and never made me earn it. If you handed me a blank sheet and told me to draw up a father from scratch, I couldn't have done any better than the one I got the day I married his daughter. 

Sometimes you don't realize how good you have it until it's gone.

He loved his music. He loved his dogs. He loved sailing. But more than any of it, he loved his family and his friends.

He laughed all the time. He'd tell the same corny joke for the dozenth time and laugh just as hard as he did the first, which set the rest of us off, which only encouraged him even more. He brought joy into every room he walked into. When you measure a life, I'm not sure there is a higher mark than that.

So, Cappy pulled out his paper charts one last time, loaded up the boat, and sailed away.

Anybody who has stood on a dock and watched a sailboat leave knows it doesn't disappear all at once. It gets smaller and smaller, and right about the time you're sure it's gone, the sail catches the light one more time. Then it slips past where your eyes can follow. The boat isn't gone. It's just somewhere you can't see yet.

That's where Cappy is now. Out ahead of us, past the horizon, telling a story too loud to a crowd that hasn't heard it before, laughing at the punchline before he gets to it.

Dickie. Richard. Rick. Captain Rick. Cappy.

A boat that big leaves a wake, and the rest of us are going to be riding his for a long time. Some people get a good father. We got Cappy. We came out way ahead.

Fair winds and following seas. We'll see you down the water.

Onward.

Pecan Crusted Redfish

8   6-7 ounce               Redfish filets

1 cup                           Flour

1 /2 tsp                        Salt

1 /4 tsp                        Pepper

1 /2 tsp                        Creole Seasoning 

1 stick                         Butter

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. 

Combine flour with seasonings. Melt butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Lightly dust filets in seasoned flour and place in skillet. Lightly brown both sides and then place on a baking sheet. Spread pecan butter over the top surface of each filet. Bake 15 minutes. Yield: 8 servings.

Pecan Butter

2 sticks                        Butter, softened

2 cups                          Pecan, chopped

1 /2 cup                       Onion, diced

1 1 /2 Tbl                    Lemon juice

2 tsp                            Hot Sauce

1 Tbl                           Garlic, minced

Place ingredients in a food processor and puree until well incorporated. Butter may be made in advance and stored in refrigerator. Allow butter to soften before preparing fish.