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Bradley Elfman moved to Las Vegas in March to take a five-month job as a computer programmer at a credit card company. On Sunday, job over, he loaded up his car and started a five-day trek home to Atlanta.

Elfman, my dad, hated Vegas when he got here. But by Sunday, he was sad to leave. He loved the mountain vistas and the physical openness of the city ("I can breathe spiritually, psychologically"). Locals were polite and friendly to him. ("No matter who I speak to, they seem to laugh or respond right away.") He was disappointed in the lack of traditional culture (art, etc.)

I realize it's indulgent to write a column about what my father thought of Vegas. But Papa Elf, as my friends call him, came with a uniquely qualified resume to touch many bases here.

He's a skateboarder, surfer and an amateur parkour enthusiast; he has a master's in physics with great knowledge of quantum mechanics and the math of black holes; he has a master's in counseling with a track in psych; he managed break dancers in New York in the early 1980s; he wrote a book on break dancing that topped a New York Times' best-seller list for an entire summer; he's an award-winning math teacher and artist (he paints abstract); he once started his own calligraphy magazine; he has an academic's worth of wisdom about poets, poetry and literature; and he watches 300 to 400 films a year, critically.

In addition to all this, my mom (his ex-wife) has always claimed I was conceived in Vegas during one of my parents' trips here when they lived in San Francisco. Is this true?

"Maybe," Dad, 68, says.

Papa Elf remembers old Vegas as a place where "singers just sang," and "they were talented people still in their prime."

New Vegas has too many "mothball people," like Cher, Bette Midler and Santana.

"They had to get them out of mothballs to bring them to Las Vegas. Sometimes, when you go to those shows, you can still smell the mothballs," he jokes. "That's a lot of decomposition after 40 or 50 years, of people who were in their prime in the '60s and '70s."

Having said that, Dad likes Bette's singing (which makes her glitzy shows even more frustrating to him) and he loved seeing nonglitzy Santana at the Hard Rock.

In fact, his grades for the shows he saw here: "Jersey Boys" (A); "Phantom" (C-); Santana (A); Allen Toussaint (a subjective F but an objective C); and his favorite, Depeche Mode (A).

He didn't see any Cirque shows, but "I see many Cirque posters," he snarks.

"I'd get rid of all those signs about mothball people on the highways," he advises. "It's oppressive. It makes me feel like I'm living in mothballs. And it never stops."

Dad's favorite place was Village Square movie theater because it's dedicated to screening international and independent films.

Dad's favorite hotel was the Bellagio, for the broad, open hallways, comfy chairs in hallways, its warmth, and the espresso and gelato of Jean Philippe's chocolate and pastry shop, "which is more special than any place I know in any hotel."

But the truth is Dad spent a lot of time at the Palms. He found it surprisingly warm and vibrant. He loved the "humongous" movie screens at the Brendan theaters. He was a big fan of eating sushi at Little Buddha and sitting at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

But more likely, you'd have seen him at Espresso Culture and Cuisine in Henderson, where he drank espresso and read or reread Hannah Arendt's "The Life of the Mind" ("It's about the history of thinking"); Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil"; Samuel Becket; Chekov; metaphysics reviews; and an interview book with Michelangelo Antonioni.

Espresso Culture is where he met his favorite smart or thoughtful people, in addition to people he met through me.

If Dad had stayed in Vegas, "I'd have to import a lot of intelligent people."

"The conversations you hear -- you feel like the people are still in high school, like they haven't grown. You go to coffee shops and clubs, and people sound like they're still in high school, the kinds of things they say, and how they say it, and how they express themselves.

"It's a certain lingo," he says. "I think the communication is a meta communication. It's not really about what they're talking about. It's never concrete. It's never abstract. It's never about ideas. It's literal. But it's also a meta language to say, 'I'm one of you, I'm one of the gang, I'm part of our culture.'"

I say to Dad, half-joking: Maybe most Las Vegans are like me and have figured out most everything about life, and don't feel the need to over-talk deep thoughts.

"They're like the man on top of the mountain," Dad replies with a laugh. "You go up there and you ask about the meaning of life, and they say, 'Who (cares)? Here, put your feet up on this rock and have a Bud Light. Life is short.'"

When Papa Elf first got to town, he skatedboarded every day at lunch and after work in a giant parking lot near the airport. But then it got too hot, so he switched to ice skating at the Las Vegas Ice Center and at Sobe ice arena. The music was horrible at both places, he says, but the ice skating would be "one of my special experiences."

When he would walk into Las Vegas Ice Center, he would see a big poster of Surya Bonaly because she practices there. Sometimes, she would be practicing three feet from him. She was prettier and more gracious than he expected and unbelievably impressive on skates.

One day, Bonaly's mom, Suzanne, was on the ice, using a rag doll to help her teach a little kid. Suddenly, she turned to my dad.

"She took time out from the little kid, walked right up to me and started telling me in a very strong French accent, 'Bend! You're not bend enough! Bend!'"

From then on, Suzanne kept giving Dad lessons for free when they were both there.

"She probably saved me four or five months of suffering by the little bits she taught me," Dad says. "And she never shows off. You never see her do fancy skating ever. But when she does something more advanced, it looks like she could do it as easily as walking."

Dad agrees with me that Vegas people are generally nice and positive. He was happy not to have heard any racist comments while he lived here. He was happy to see so many interracial couples, and more than that, other people didn't stare them down. He was happy to see plenty of lesbian and gay couples out in the open.

And though he found the town lacking intellectual pursuits, he had a breakthrough in his abstract painting because when he first got to town, he was lonely in a spare apartment (his wife, Shari, stayed in Atlanta while he was here).

"I was in an alien town, in an alien apartment that was like a motel room, and something about that isolation allowed me to concentrate.

"So I'm not the same painter as when I came, and that doesn't happen too often in anyone's life. For some people, it never happens. I don't know if that would have ever happened if I hadn't been alone in a funny apartment on a balcony facing the mountains.

"This town that was culturally empty for me ended up being my place to find myself as a painter, as a greater person."

Dad has many more things to say, for instance, about his run-ins with Penn Jillette, who brushed him off at a Borders bookstore, and how Holly Madison is a symbol of the sexually free ways women dress here.

"It's women's liberation," I say of women's styles.

"It's men's liberation, is more like it," Dad says.

But we're out of time. Dad tried to get a job as a math teacher to stay here. He interviewed with an elementary principal who loved Dad and guaranteed him a job. But the School Board turned him down.

"It's hard to believe, when they're begging for math teachers," Dad says.

And so, Sunday morning, we loaded up his beater car. His wife had flown to Vegas to drive home with him. And off they went.

Leaving Las Vegas, there drove away my favorite person in town, the break dancing, black hole-describing, psych counseling, skateboarding, espresso-spilling film dork. I don't know what I'm going to do without him.