Father’s Day 2014

~ Live & Learn

trees-sky-sun-light
Kids are rustling me awake from my mid-morning nap in the backyard.

Dad, Dad, it’s time to open the gifts!

(A flash of Christmas mornings past. Wow, that was quite a nap, Rip.  They’ve migrated up from cologne and neck ties. Hmmmm. Right pocket, left pocket, transfer of funds? All within Dad’s pant pockets? Not nice Dad.)

Thank you. Wonderful Gift!

Family sits together for brunch. Scrambled eggs, western style, bacon, sliced peaches, English Muffins (with jam, of course). (Family sitting around the table. Soul warming. How many of these moments are left?)

We head outside. 68º F. Low humidity. Wind gusts at 16 mph. Trees rustling overhead. Zeke is barking, while giving chase to the Frisbee flying to and fro overhead. The Kanigan family exercise for the Day.

I reach for my book. Zeke is sprawled out on the back stoop, basking in the sun, and watching Blue Jays pecking at seed in the feeder.  Rachel and Eric shade their eyes from the sun, and their iPhones, as they check their texts. I settle in on the lawn chair with my book. (Front doors unlocked. Families sitting together for meals. Kid’s playing catch with Dad in the backyard, or playing outside with friends. Pick-up games. Fishing. Exploring the mountainside.) 

I feel, to repeat, lucky to have come of age in the 1950s, a time of prosperity, tranquility, and extraordinary optimism about the future. Growing up during that time, one felt that one’s life was going to be richer than that of one’s parents—and not merely financially richer. It is a measure of the psychological distance we have come since the fifties that one looks today upon one’s children and grandchildren and feels, with sadness, that their lives, far from being better than one’s own, are likely to be worse. The very real prospects of scarcity, perpetual animosity among social groups, radical slackening in educational and every other kind of standard—such are among only the larger disfiguring craters looming on the lunar landscape of the future. (Joseph Epstein, A Literary Education and Other Essays (pp. 65-66).

Dad, where do you want to go for dinner?
Pause.
I’m good.
You’re good?
I’m good, right here.

Credits:

  • Photograph – me! Backyard directly overhead.
  • Joseph Epstein Book: Thank you Michael Wade from Execupundit.com for the wonderful recommendation in his post: National Treasure.

 

32 thoughts on “Father’s Day 2014”

  4. Nice photograph, DK…I can feel what you feel when you look up through the leaves, catching glints of sunlight, mixed with the blue, blue sky. You are blessed to have what you have with your children, and they are so blessed to have you. As for the “… larger disfiguring craters looming on the lunar landscape of the future”… yes, we live in a world with an uncertain future for our children, which makes it all the more important to cherish days such as you are having today. Happy Father’s Day to you… 🙂

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  12. That naiveté of the 50s (grew up then, too) was really an illusion. Our children (and I say “our” just to be companionable) will have to be braver than we were, more mindful of their impact on the earth and on each other. Priorities have changed. That’s not necessarily bad.

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