I'm 31 and have never had a serious relationship. My sister is 24, and we have yet to meet her first boyfriend, who we thought would be standing on our stoop with a box of chocolates by now.

Logical deduction tells me that something went on in our house. We're not children of divorce, were never abused and grew up in an English Tudor with a wishing well out front, for Christ's sake.

It's said that a girl marries her father. Point blank, if either my sister or I were to do that, our family would implode. In this case, our father is a Vietnam Vet who survived being shot in the head. He doesn't believe in paying taxes, hunts deer in people's back yard with a bow and arrow, and refers to our mother as his "ho." Quite the contrary, our mother's favorite pastime is pulling up to my sister's equestrian events in her 2007 black Lexus dressed in head-to-toe Ann Taylor.

At the age of 61, my father took to extreme sports presumably because on the 40th anniversary of getting shot in the head nothing really exciting had happened. He became obsessed with roller blading, which wouldn't qualify as an extreme sport unless you take the brakes out of your skates, which is exactly what my father did. Whenever I ask my father a logical question he always answers, "Not my problem."

In this case, it took some gentle cajoling, "How did you slow down without slamming into a tree?"

He responded, "I grabbed onto an African-American man."

When I asked if the man in question cared, he responded with, "Not my problem."

I became upset and started ranting that he could have hurt a child. It was at this point that he regaled me with a story about how he was careening in a fetal position at 10 m.p.h. around a local lake. Through his blurred vision he spied a small blond girl in his path. She had on a lavender dress; her pigtails were bobbing up and down as she pranced alongside her mother. Fast and furious, my father barreled towards her. Unable to stop, he picked her up just seconds before both bodies were about to collide. He told me that they rode together for a while and when he was able to slow down he placed her on the grass.

"What did her mother say?" I asked.

He responded, "Not my problem."

When it gets too cold to roller blade, he skis. Well, sort of. Strapping on his helmet and a pair of skis that he obtained from another Vietnam vet who he claims "owed me a favor," he takes to the mountains of upstate New York.

Wielding his Disabled American Veterans' pass that he got for, well, getting shot, he skis free at some resorts and gets discounts at others. Claiming that he braves "the scariest mountains that are sheets of ice," he doesn't use poles and simply places his body in a cannonball position and takes off.

Naturally, I once asked, "What if you hit someone?"