My dad would’ve turned 90 this past Tuesday, but he died in 2010 at 76.

His father had lived into his mid-90s. As an aficionado of healthful eating, distance running, scuba diving and more, my dad had been confident he’d live somewhere in that neighborhood, too, but it was not to be.

We weren’t exactly close. He was strong, smart, friendly and funny, if not affectionate. He could cut you with his lacerating wit. He was an avid reader and could tell a story, too.

He was a firefighter for the City of Miami — or as he called it ad nauseam, “The Best Job in the World.” He was on duty for 24 hours every third day, and I’d always be relieved when his rusty, trusty green ‘72 Ford pickup pulled back into the driveway. It wasn’t that I’d worried about him. He seemed invincible to me. I just missed having him around.

Cancer, not his career choice, is what got to him. Fortunately, around 2008, he began writing down his memories. Some were stories he told often. Others were surprises.

He mailed them to me in batches, and I typed them up. When I pine to hear his voice now, I crack open the doc “Dad’s stories.”

There are gems about joining the Navy at 17, his Caribbean adventures, weirdo Miamians, diving wrecks, falling off boats and ladders. Of course, I head straight to the anecdotes about me as a kid:

“Many a morning we would get up and discover a chair pulled up in front of a kitchen cabinet where the cookies were stored. He would apparently get up at some hour of the night or early morning and make his way in the dark to snag some cookies.”

Moving chairs led to other projects:

“Dave was always building something when he was young. When his friend Andy moved away, he decided he would build an airplane to go visit him. I always had some old lumber lying around, and Dave would salvage some to make some rather intricate and imaginative facsimiles of an aircraft.”

There’s a good one about my first haircut as a feral 1-year-old whose hair had grown to neck-length:

“He was OK with it at first, but at some point he decided he had had enough. At first I tried holding his arms down for the barber so he could work. Dave was determined to end it. I eventually wound up getting him in a headlock. This worked for a while, then Dave came up with another tactic. He decided to spit in the barber’s face as he was working. Dave had a good aim and he seemed to have a good supply. The barber hung in there and got the job done. The other customers loved it.”

When I was preschool-aged, my two older sisters did their primary education at a Catholic school, as I later would, and my mom was a substitute teacher there, too, so sometimes I had to come along. I never speared a tiger shark — yes, Dad did that, too — but I had my own kind of fearlessness: As a tot visiting the school, I reciprocated a nun’s stopping to say hello to me with a swift kick to the shin.

No amount of Hail Marys will prevent my going to hell after such a sin. I’d say pray for me, but what’s the use?

Appreciating strong women starts with mom

Despite how I felt about nuns, I was quite enamored of the “older” ladies of St. Thomas. Girls in whatever classroom my mom was teaching in that day would call me over to sit on their laps so they could fawn over me. I was in heaven. I can only assume that is what led to this section after my failed aviation attempts.

“He later went on to build a series of really large and complicated forts in the backyard. Good training for all the skateboard ramps that were to come. The one thing he never got around to was the ‘teeny bopper trap.’ When Dave was visiting his older sisters at St. Thomas, for whatever reason, he always went on about the teeny boppers in the girls’ classes. He had plans to get them in the trap he never got around to building.”

That’s not quite true: I remember climbing a tree on the church’s campus and doing something with a pile of sticks, rubber bands and batteries I’d collected from God knows where. How it worked was, it didn’t. I can only hope my efforts were of noble intent.

Like some of his firefighter buddies, my dad supplemented his salary doing construction and handyman jobs on his days off. After age forced him to retire from the fire department at 52, he continued working construction jobs. John, one of my oldest friends, sometimes worked alongside him after I’d left home. I envied their time together.

Around 2000, when John visited us in Tampa, I told him I had no idea how my dad felt about my choices, my career, my life — what had become of his boy.

John looked shocked. He told me how proud my dad was of me, how he boasted of me and spoke glowingly about the articles I would mail home.

I never heard it directly, but I wasn’t so different. I bragged about my dad all the time, but did he know how much I admired him?

I learned that my dad wept when he found out we were leaving Florida and moving to Oregon. Given the distance, I saw him in person only a handful of times after the move.

Once, when I was a teen, my mom said: “You know, your father thinks you hate him.”

I hope I gave her a look like the one John gave me. I loved my father to pieces. I was just being 16!

As he neared the end of his life, I tried to convey how I felt about him, how much I loved and appreciated him as a man and as my father, but how do you really make up for lost time and ground?

A few times a week, I text my three daughters to ask them about school, work and weather on the other side of the hill.

It’s really just an excuse to tell them, often, that I love them. Because regrets, I have a few.

I wish I’d visited my dad more, or that there’d been some way to trap him here.

God, how I wish I could build a craft to come see you, Dad.

At least we have your stories.