Hey, hey Daddio!

My dad's booked his tickets. He's finally coming to visit in late September.

It's not as though Dad's afraid of New York -- he was a cop for nearly 30 years and I bet he'll still be packin' when he checks into his hotel in the Disney-fied Times Square. It's not even a matter of him not being interested in New York. He's road tripped here before, when he was on a mobster kick. He read all the books he could on Gotti, then went and staked out some coffee shop in Little Italy to check out the crime scene himself.

No, it's more that my stubborness is genetic and Dad just refused to come visit after I had the audacity to leave Michigan. And just as the economy is doing so well, too. Wonder what ever possessed me to want to go someplace else with a top 10 business degree and an interest in the media?

But apparently we've worn him down. John's been collecting these fantastic care packages since we moved here. He keeps enormous envelopes on his desk and every time he sees an article in the Times about something he thinks my dad would like, or grabs a menu for a restaurant that he thinks is Dad's style, or anything at all remotely interesting about our adoptive city, into the envelope it goes. Dad's probably gotten half a dozen of these piles of New York goodies so far, including cigars from a shop John was fixated on for a while and a review of A Chorus Line, which my straight-arrow Dad is really interested in seeing.

I'll be glad to finally show him around, including a visit to the AP, a walk around Central Park and a stop at our favorite coffee shop. Maybe he'll be the Tom Hanks character who meets his Meg Ryan on the upper west side and he'll move to the city ...

Not likely.