After dinner, I showed Dad the conference program from Utah League of Cities and Towns convention, an annual gathering of elected municipal mayors and city councils and their appointed senior staffs (e.g., me). I told him how much I enjoyed the keynote presenter, the goalkeeper from the 1980 U.S. Olympic gold-medal ice hockey team, which defeated the Soviet team for the first time ever—the “miracle” team—and who translated the principles of his athletic success to management.  On the rink, he had blocked 63 puck shots with his body armor and stick, allowing only two goals.  Dad perused the program and asked, “Did any of these classes have to do with your job?”  What I heard him say was, You didn’t belong there.  It was a feel-good waste.  You should have been in your office working, not out hob-knobbing at some irrelevant conference.  Perhaps that was not fair of me to mind read in this manner.  But I have worked as the Tooele City Attorney for more than 30 years.  I know my job.  And I don’t need his approbation to go to this or that class or conference.  I decided to answer his paternalistic question with my own humiliating fealty: “Of course, they have to do with my job, or I would not have gone to them” and by identifying the law-related sessions (which was all of them) and reminding him of the importance of making myself a valued member of a municipal team which includes six elected officials, all of whom rely on me, all of whom expect me to be the smartest person in the room, and all of whom can fire me.  I felt annoyed with myself at having answered him at all, when what I really wanted to do was say Whatever.