I'll turn 57 in a couple of days. If life can be compared to an eight-hour day at work, I'm taking my 2 o'clock break.

And it's so not bad. After all, I'm still a knight.

My father was a scholarly man. He liked to read history, and, when I turned out to be an early reader, he made sure I had books, usually books that were four or five years above my grade level. We talked history like other fathers and sons talk sports.

And when I was 10, he gave me a biography of Charlemagne, who was king of France around A.D. 800.

It was a great book for a boy, full of knights and battles and chivalry and everlasting honor for which a man will die and the love of Christ and brave Roland dying, pierced by hundreds of wounds.

My father was not physically indulgent, by which I mean I was expected to do what he told me to do, sit where he told me to sit, go where he told me to go and shut up when the adults were talking.

He was intellectually indulgent. I could think what I wanted to think, read what I wanted to read, and ask the questions I wanted to ask.

So, at age 10, when, full of Charlemagne, I asked him to knight me, he did not roll an eye, nor did he answer in any way that might have been considered dismissive. He didn't even act as if I was doing something "cute."

He made a sword from two pieces of wood, and he took me out in the backyard, in a sunny spot between the trees, and he told me to kneel.

My father spoke French as his native language, and he'd won the Latin prize in his high school and had served as an altar boy in the days of the Latin Mass.

Using both languages, he knighted me, tapping me on both shoulders with the blade of the sword.

And he bid me rise, saying that I must be a "chevalier sans peur et sans reproche," which is French for a knight without fear and beyond reproach. I learned much later that those words were used to describe Pierre Terrail, a famous 16th-century French knight.

I am, of course, not without fear and I am not without reproach, but I have struggled after both all my life.

And I think I have made that struggle in great part because I am a knight, because the need to try for nobility was passed to me by my father, a book-loving bartender who laid his hands and chivalry's duty on me as surely as if he had been Charlemagne himself.

I have done wrong, but I have struggled against it and made it right when I could. I have had the worst of many bargains because I will not cheat and have hurt myself striving for honor's prize.

And when I fall, I hear my father's voice.

"Rise, sir knight," he says.

To learn more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Marc Munroe Dion's collection of Pulitzer Prize-nominated columns, "Between Wealth and Welfare: A Liberal Curmudgeon in America," is available for Kindle and Nook.