At 91, my father Erwin A. Thompson still knows how to play and shares this gift with the children who surround him. An 8-year-old friend who lives down the hill loves to play with my father. Pop still has that spark, that joy in living. He invents new games and revives old ones. Pop has a youthful heart inside an aging body. You can clearly see the boy inside the man.

When his three children were growing up, he played Trap, Climb the Mountain, Elephant Tail, Airplane, and Skin the Cat wih us. These were special games that we only played with him. Other games belonged to our separate childhood play. During the time my mother earned her Masters in Education at Washington University in St. Louis, we were often with him in the evenings and these physical games, almost a form of gymnastics, were the ones we played, amidst many giggles.

The times the three of us children played with my father are some of my favorite memories of growing up with him. At times Pop could be stern and forbidding, but when he came back to his playful nature and made time to play games with his children, he showed his love and the tender side of his manhood. By playing with us, he signaled he was not only an authority figure to be obeyed, but also a human being.

My fathers physical strength and wind can no longer support those games, but he and his young playmate find other games to delight them. They play hide-and-go-seek in his big house. Pop said he could hear her giggling in the closet, but went there last so she could have a sense of having successfully hidden. Children still jump on his bed or jump on the hay in the barn. These are the types of games that children are rarely able to play these days in closely controlled circumstances and even more constricted video games.

My father often sings with this child and teaches her the old songs of his childhood and mine. He also helps her with her spelling and is a brilliant teacher, intuitively. For the word scarf, he tells her: Think of a cat and a dog. The cat goes scccccccc and the dog goes arf! Theres a cat inside scat that you say scat to. Thats how you know its a c and not a k. By making learning playful and linking the word to images and sounds, spelling becomes easy and fun.

My father, at 91, is an old dog who keeps learning new tricks and teaches those tricks to the community that gathers around him. He has tapped into the Fountain of Youth explorers throughout the centuries searched for. Cosmetic companies pay big bucks to make us think youth comes out of a jar. But, it aint so, folks. Youth comes from a heart filled with love.