When I was growing up, I didn’t know anyone else who played games like my dad. He loved to play like a kid, and he played with my brother Ben and me all the time. Thursday nights, when Mom worked late, were the best nights. I would order Domino’s pizza with extra mushrooms and Dad, Ben, and I would eat off paper towels around the kitchen table. One person got to use the lid of the pizza box as his or her plate. This was highly prized, for some reason.

After dinner, it was time for tackle football in the backyard. Tackle football with Dad had no actual football rules. It simply involved Ben and I chasing our dad around the backyard, trying to get the football away from him. The way to get it from him was to catch him, tackle him, and wrestle him to the ground. Once one of us had nabbed the football, it was our turn to be chased and tackled. This game set a high bar for hilarity that I found hard to match later in my life.

Another favorite Dad-game involved both Ben and me sitting on a huge red cotton quilt we had. Dad would drag the quilt around the slick wood-floored downstairs of our decaying Victorian house. But he wouldn’t just walk around with the quilt. He would run, as fast as he could, whipping us around the corners and banging us into the walls. The goal was to stay on, at all costs, even hanging on by one hand. And he never stopped either, no matter how hard you begged. But usually we were laughing too hard to do any begging, anyway.

Dad had more games: reading H.P Lovecraft to Ben and me in the attic by candlelight (so we could get extra scared), playing hide-and-seek at night with all the lights off, turning us upside down and pitching us into the yew shrub in our front yard (appropriately, he called this game “Shrub.”). We watched old Laurel and Hardy movies when my mom was out of town and drank limeade and ate frozen Milky Way bars. We played ping-pong in the living room. He and I spent one afternoon peacefully coloring mustaches and devil’s horns on every face in my Mister Rogers picture book. No one had a more fun dad than me, I often thought when I was a child. And now that I’m grown, I’m realizing just how true that was.