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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, [...] “Now you know that Saturday morning is when we go to the lumber company, don’t you? They have gum and candy machines, so we’ll need to take our money.” Thus spoke the young man to his tiny three-day-old son–and our first grandchild. In bygone years, whenever I’d yell, “Let’s go to the lumber company,” Barrett’s response [...] At the recent rehearsal dinner for our son and his fiancée, a few of us older folk injected one of their last hours of singleness with bits of wisdom learned gleaned through our own struggles in life. If you’ll indulge me, I’ll pass along a few personal musings that time didn’t allow that evening. —– 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. Whoever says you can’t train cats just doesn’t know. Training involves establishing strong ties between cause and effect, and cats learn quickly. Training brings results. As creatures of routine, cats develop habits that may seem peculiar to us. Proper training demands that we identify those habits and exploit them to our advantage. Let me illustrate with a [...] Last week I heard the early morning wail of a train. Though trains are commonplace in our city, fleeting years and evolving circumstances have diminished their importance to me, and I seldom notice them anymore. Our son was 19 months old when we moved here, and for a brief but pleasant span of years trains played [...] |
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