Dan Copenbarger is one of my oldest friends. We’ve known each other since sixth grade, during which I gave him the name “Booger,” by which he was widely known until his late teenage years. I have expressed my apologies many times to him since.
Dan and I were drinking one night about five years ago at a bar called Buddha Bob’s, while his girlfriend was pregnant with their first child, and I asked him how he felt about being a future dad. He said, as I well knew, that he didn’t even really know who his dad was, and that the series of boyfriends that lived with his mom while he grew up were mostly total shitheads who smacked him around and degraded him. He said, given these facts and the negative ways they’d affected him, that he was going to do whatever he could to be the best goddamned dad he was capable of being.
And that’s exactly what he’s done. Is doing. It’s obvious how easy it is for cycles to repeat through generations, kids with shitty dads become shitty dads themselves, despite good intentions, etc. But Dan has bucked the trend. This owes to the fact that he’s just a solid all-around dude in general, thoughtful and honest, hard-working and responsible, generally good humored, and that he was smart enough to find a baby mama (basically wife at this point), Nissa, who wouldn’t take any shit even if he tried to dole it out. It’s a happy fucking functional family if I’ve ever seen one, and I got to spend a few hours in their living room yesterday bullshitting with Dan and Nissa and horsing around with the kids, who gleefully urged their dad again and again to throw pillows at their faces.
