Skip to main content

Flashback Friday



HAPPY FATHER'S DAY




Fatherhood isn't easy.  It's like attempting to scale a steep cliff with one hand grasping a rope while the other swatting those pesky   Midwest gnats. It's doable, but one wrong move and its pretty calamitous.  Likewise the offspring - libraries are filled with Macbethian tales of discord, failed emulation, boots that can't be filled, and other stories of woe.  The father son-daughter relationships are like other things in nature, I suppose, beautiful in many ways yet with hidden dangers.  Nature is like that.    

If your Dad has passed perhaps the best thing we can do is remember them having tried their best to be great Fathers.  Most succeed marvelously.  Maybe we need to look at ourselves to see their true accomplishment - the grown adults they helped mold.  We are, ultimately our fathers.  Imperfect, perhaps quietly terrified, usually gallantly noble in the face of adversity and heroic, too.  It takes a real man/father to help bring life into the world, to whisper to that life, "I will protect you.  Trust me."  To work every day to insure a level of comfort; to sacrifice their youth and dreams in order to provide security and the essential needs of life to their family.  

Sure, the sons and daughters grow up to learn the flaws of their fathers, but that makes them no less heroic. In fact it should enhance - it makes the sacrifice even nobler - it makes the daily struggle more daunting.  And so, on this weekend, give more than just a thought to the Dad's in our lives and make peace with the memory or be sad with the loss, and if you are lucky enough to still have them, tell them you love them.  Before its too late.

The above pictures are of my Dad at the Seaton home.      



   



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Summer Swim

It's Monday and the start of another work week.  Except for me.  I have the week off because the parents of my daycare charges are taking the week off, too. This is one of those wordless posts I love on Mondays so I can put my laziness in full view of loyal readers.  These pics need no words.  Why muddy the waters?   They were taken at the pool at Sinkhole Estates aka Death Valley.  The nice thing about this pool is it is heated in winter.  If one must find positives in one's situation, I suppose that is one.  But, please, no more.   

Flashback Friday

Class, Or Lack Thereof The Dwight Vice gravestone in Oquawka, Illinois. I bring this old chestnut out every so often just to remind me that class is classless.  Dwight Vice was killed in his home near Oquawka in 2001.  It was one of those things that can generate crime:  two guys thought Dwight had a lot of money stashed at home because of his pot-selling sideline to supplement his fishing job.   Not really one of those big drug deals gone-bad things.  Marijuana was, according to the trial, about the only stuff Dwight sold.   But these two guys barge into the house and killed Dwight and attempted to kill his 11 year old kid, Darryl, before they took off with what money they could find.   His son, now 23, was stabbed in the back and left for dead.  He survived and is wheelchair bound and has undergone several surgeries to repair his wounds.  He will be paralyzed for life.   None of this is pleasant.  Reading the facts of the murder and attempted murder are most unpleasant