Your dad at nineteen had a band, a mustache and plans he quietly shelved when you arrived. Ask him about them.

Parents arrive in your life already edited down to the role. You get the version that makes dinner and worries about your grades, not the nineteen-year-old with a band and a set of plans that got put away without much ceremony. Those plans did not vanish. They were set aside, usually quietly, usually for reasons that involve you.

Ask him about it if you can. Not as a debt to settle, just as curiosity about a person you only know from one angle. Most parents are surprised and pleased to be asked, and the answers tend to explain things you never understood.