I repost this old article as a reminder to enjoy Christmas with family and loved ones as long as time and opportunity permit you to do so. Though death has taken the wife and daughter mentioned here from me, I hope to relive some of the magic that children bring to Christmas morning by watching [...]
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I saw her for the last time on such a rare and wonderful autumn day as this. With fall crispness charging the air, our long, lingering stroll around the campus let her enjoy the unique texture of October breeze and sun upon her cheeks. Our visit completed, I offered my goodbyes–without realizing she was hearing them [...] This article was originally published in the October 1982 issue of Moody Monthly magazine. Jenny lived for 13 more years after the article was written. You will see just the first page of the article below, but there’s also link where you can read it all. Read the entire article here Childhood is incredibly fragile and fleeting. And though its passage can be gauged in finite increments of months and years, parents easily identify with the “first times” which punctuate their memories. Some, such as first words and first steps, are rarely forgotten. Still, a subtle exchange is underway as “first times” are seamlessly displaced by “last [...] I write this on the eve of Father’s Day–my first as a grandfather and my son’s first as a father. Thus I evaluate fatherhood by my own experience, both failure and success, and offer a few characteristics of the ideal father I wish I had better exhibited: Fathers go to work when they don’t want to, [...] Just before midnight, the whistling outside put me on alert. Then the front door swung opened. Our son, Barrett, had come home unexpectedly, jostling a large sack. Had he been younger, I might have expected him to extract a kitten or other wayward animal. "What's in the sack?" I suspiciously inquired. "You'll see," came his mysteriously reply. His [...] Regular readers know our daughter Jenny, who died unexpectedly in October 1995. So in honor of Father’s Day, I share this brief essay about her that I prepared for a writing contest. And to that I add a few journal snippets from Father’s Days past. A few weeks ago, my wife's cryptic comment sent me scurrying: "All I want for Christmas is for you to pay attention to what you see and write a little diary of the details." So I tried to oblige–and enclose a few observations herein. –Maudie Nell soaks in the river of sunlight flowing through the kitchen [...] Though escape is a game we learn as children, secret desires to disappear unnoticed–and to surface into a more agreeable situation–intensify in proportion to stress. In his single-digit years, our son sharpened the secret art of escape virtually nightly. Feigning invisibility, he clambered without fanfare to the back of our station wagon to squeeze into the [...] This week's mail brings a letter from a distraught mother whose only child is painfully separating herself from her family–and a note of encouragement to that mother from an older friend. This poignant exchange holds two important lessons. —– |
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