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Posted on 06/20/2009 4:59:59 PM PDT by Brad’s Gramma
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. . .can be any day!
". . .a small boy felt himself lifted from bed. Then he was borne in his father’s arms, with the swiftness of a dream, down the porch steps, out onto the beach.
"‘Watch!’ his father said. And incredibly, as he spoke, one of the stars moved...it flashed across the astonished heavens. And before the wonder of this could fade, another star leaped from its place, and then another, plunging toward the restless sea. ‘What is it?’ the child whispered. ‘Shooting stars,’ his father said. ‘. . . I thought you’d like to see the show.’"
"Decades have passed, but I remember that night still, because I was the fortunate 7-year-old whose father believed that a new experience was more important for a small boy than an unbroken night’s sleep. . . . What I remember is the night the stars fell, the day we rode in a caboose, the time we tried to skin an alligator, the telegraph we made that really worked.
". . . Or the time we explored a cave, and at one point far under ground, snapped off our flashlights and sat there in darkness and silence so profound that it was like being in the void before the beginning of time. After a while Father said, in a whisper, ‘Listen! You can hear the mountain breathing!’
"I remember the books left by my bed that pushed back my horizons and sometimes actually changed my life.
"Did my father deliberately set out to manufacture Father’s Days for his children? I doubt it. . . . I don’t think he was primarily seeking to instruct or inspire or enlighten us. He was satisfying his own curiosity–and letting us in on his discoveries. He was indulging his own sense of wonder–and letting us share it. . . and when this happens, there is no satisfaction in the world quite like it.
"My father had . . . the gift of opening doors for his children, of leading them into areas of splendid newness. This subtle art . . . doesn’t necessarily require a great deal of time. It simply involves doing things more often with our children instead of for them or to them.
"This is the stuff of which real Father’s Days are made . . . and when it happens, there is no satisfaction in the world quite like it."
-Arthur Gordon - "A Touch of Wonder" © 1974
Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads out there!
I love that poem.. I printed it out to place on top of my husband’s Father’s Day gifts :)
Lamh Foistenach Abu!
Thank you for this evening’s thread Grammie & a blessed Lords Day to you!
Happy Fathers Day to Grampa!:) *hugs*
Of all the things that I have ever learned in this life, the value of fatherhood is most important.
I was not so fortunate as some, but I am more blessed than most.
I would have it that all would perceive & understand certain things as I do.
Soldier's Creed
I am an American Soldier.
I am a Warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the United States and live the Army Values.
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills. I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.
I am an expert and I am a professional.
I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.
I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.
I am an American Soldier.
Lamh Foistenach Abu!
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Hey to all Daddy Freepers on the board I got question do you find it weird that nobody has Daddy song
Mama has song about her I love Mama Dear Mama Tupac Shakur wrote song about his Mom what the daddy song
Papa was Rolling Stone by Temptation Just a thought I have
Breaking news report from Jersrelum Post getting bad in Teheran Iran report of 19 people got whack by Crazy Nut job forces
Thanks for your comment. For more on my views of the Founders, see my “about” page.
SALUTE
I have always viewed my father as a patriot. He loved his country, and not with the stupid nationalistic fervor that is the stereotype of the military man. He loved his country, and his place in it. He was a competent, thoughtful, measured, compassionate and fair naval officer. It showed in the way his contemporaries and subordinates viewed him, or so I am told. But I can concur with them, on the basis of my own personal experience. And my dad was always a naval officer, even when he was raking the leaves or fixing a faucet, it was clear who he was. Until he passed away last week, that was how he conducted his life. My friends, who knew virtually nothing about him, referred to him as “The Commander”. And they said it with evident respect.
I never remember being treated unfairly by him, ever. I can remember being so angry with him that I almost hated him, but I think every child has felt that way towards their parents at least once in their life. It kind of goes with the territory of being a kid. You just don’t understand why things are done a certain way, and your one-dimensional view of things is always the most important one.
As kids, my dad was not a big talker. When he did talk, it was rarely to make small talk, so like E.F. Hutton, when he talked you listened. And he ALWAYS spoke before he approached us or touched us. My mother used to make us wait until dad came home to administer his discipline. We would wait in our room, and we could hear his muted voice speaking with my mother as soon as he got home. Then, as he mounted the stairs, he would remove his belt (we could hear him remove it…) and he would double up the belt and make a loud snapping sound with it as he ascended the stairs. I recognize this now as psychological warfare. We repented our crimes before he ever had to even speak to us. When he entered the room, the tone of his voice would do all of the work. He rarely swore at us (his favorite insult whenever he was really angry with us, was to call us “Dumb Bunnies”. To this day we have to giggle a little amongst ourselves at this…”Dumb Bunnies…why on earth would he call us Dumb Bunnies, and what the heck is a Dumb Bunny anyway?” His voice always had a timbre to it that demanded our attention. He required that we look him in the face and say “Yes Sir” or “No Sir”. He expected us to respond to our Mother with “Yes Maam” and “No Maam”. Then he might flail at us with his belt while we squealed, but would never really connect with it. It was all show. We didn’t know that though. We really thought he was trying to hit us. The truth be told, we feared my mother much more as a disciplinarian. She had the Mediterranean emotion, and you could never be sure just how far you had pushed her. And we did push her on occasion. Looking back, it was all pretty predictable fare. In this light, I had a memorable encounter with my dad. It speaks volumes to me about my father, but at the time, was most puzzling because of its nature.
When we lived in Virginia, I was about 7 years old, and had walked a couple of miles to a candy store that was in a part of our town that was much poorer, and predominately black. When I came home, my dad asked me where I had been, and I said, “Oh, I just went over to Niggertown to get some candy…”
In a very swift motion, my dad grabbed me, one big adult hand around each skinny seven-year-old bicep, and drew me towards him so that my nose was probably less than a foot away from his nose. The term today for this was “In my face”. This was very close, and VERY unusual. He never dealt with us like this. I will never forget the look on his face, it wasn’t anger, and I didn’t know what it was. And the tone of his voice when he spoke was a tone I had never heard before. There was something else, not anger, but something. I didn’t know what it was at the time. My father looked at me, directly in the eyes, with his eyes the unwavering steely blue that they were, with this very foreign, strange and unusual look in them, a sharpness or brightness that was totally unrecognizable to me at that age. He gave me one shake, not a hard one, a gentle one, and said to me in that odd voice:
“Don’t ever think that you are better than someone else just because you were born with a different color skin.” He released me, stood up to regard me for an instant then walked away without another word. I remember just standing there totally confused about this strange encounter. I had never seen him look at me that way or speak to me that way. I remember it as clearly as if it happened this morning.
Now that I am older, I think of that encounter and I know with certainty what the look he had in his eyes was. I know what the odd tone of his voice was.
It was passion. My dad had passion, and never, ever showed it to us as kids. But just that once, when I was a child, a door had cracked open (I am sure quite by accident) and I had seen the light that escaped. Before I could go and look inside, the door had snapped shut and sealed tight. I never got a chance to see into the room sealed by that door until many years later. By then, I was no longer surprised by what I saw. I had made the transition from viewing my father as a parent to viewing him as a person.
It is no surprise to anyone that I hero-worshipped my dad. I wanted to be him, my whole life. I never aspired after baseball players or presidents. I wanted to be my dad. I wanted to look like him. I would go over to the building across the street where my dad worked, and watch him walk down the halls, his feet sounding like the voice of authority itself. Then, I would try to imitate him so my footsteps would sound the same. I wanted to wear a uniform and serve my country like him. I wanted his values. I wanted to be a patriot like him. To this day, I wish I could emulate his life, and no other.
When I began to write this eulogy, I was going to eulogize my father in the context of the contrast between his generation and my generation. I grew to realize as I wrote, that our generations had more in common than I thought. In the furnaces of the depression and World War II where the character of their generation was tempered, men and women like my father and mother were produced. I was going to discuss “The Generation Gap”, and realized that the gap between the generations is one for my generation to bridge, not the other way around. My father’s generation has been called the “Greatest Generation”, with good reason. With the release of movies like “Saving Private Ryan” and books like “The Flag of Our Fathers”, many men and women of my generation are starting to understand why that description has been given to their parents generation. On first glance, one might think that the subject of “Saving Private Ryan” and “The Flag of Our Fathers” is war.
It isn’t.
Their subject is not war, but life. How to live it. How to do what must be done. Doing what is right. Duty. Responsibility. Accountability. When my father was 24, he was the Post Commander for the American Legion, organizing blood drives for veterans hospitals, collecting toys for underprivileged families. In his forties and fifties, he was involved in town politics because he wanted to help. In his sixties and seventies, he was intensely involved in Alcoholics Anonymous. Of all the things in his life that my father accomplished, if there was only one accomplishment he could claim and keep, I would tell him to keep his association with AA. Of all the things he did in his life, it is this that inspires the most pride in me. AA was his second family. Thank God. AA changed my father in ways that totally blew away the whole family. With the alcohol gone, we finally saw the kind of person he really was, and had been all of those years. We saw what a kind, generous, considerate person he was. We discovered he had a very egalitarian view of humanity. We saw his humor, which was rarely revealed to us. And most of all, the door opened to that room I had only caught a glimpse of as a child, and we were all invited to freely look inside, and we saw something my dad never advertised that he possessed.
Passion.
Passion for his country, Passion for his family, and passion for his fellow man. It had been there all the time and we had rarely recognized it, because above all, my father was a humble, private man. Like many men of his generation, he shunned the limelight and did things that needed to be done without blowing his own horn. I never ever heard him brag. Never. I never saw him complete a task, and look for praise. He just did things, and when they were complete, he went on the next thing without waiting for a pat on the back. That was my dad. A real man. He was, and is, my hero.
This is an emotional thank-you to Brad’s Gramma, who asked me if I would consider reposting my Dad’s eulogy I delivered in 2000 for this beautiful Father’s Day thread.
My dad has been gone now for for nine years. I can hardly believe it. I miss him so much, and wish I could have just a chance to speak with him again. Just for a few minutes. I love him so much, and isn’t it odd, him gone so many years and all of a sudden, right now, I feel like a band-aid has been ripped off my heat exposing that hole in it. He was a good, good man. I was just speaking about him with my brother the other day, and something I hadn’t thought about for years popped back into my head.
It is his relationship with two men in our town.
There was one gentleman named Manny, who lived in the house next to ours on the busy Main Street. It was a house of men, three brothers, a father and an uncle. All of them were mentally ill with varying degrees of schizophrenia. Even though they had been there as long as my dad had (he purchased the house he grew up in from his father after he retired from the Navy)
These men were scary, to say the least. The most severely affected of the boys was in and out of high security mental facilities, where he had been repeatedly sent for violent behavior. The other two boys were able to function in society. The father was a recluse, and Manny was...well...a huge question mark. In all the years I lived there since 1973, I was the only one from my family who had gone in their house. It was the town haunted house, kids would cross to the other side of the street. The house was completely overgrown with vegetation, the front porch door was broken for years and held on by one hinge. When I went in the house for something, the squalor was indescribable...a thick covering of grease on the stove...no furniture, mattresses on the floor with no sheets. The claw-foot bathtub was literally broken in half.
Anyway, Manny was the uncle. He ran a dry goods store downtown that could have come out of of the great depression or the wild west. All the goods were stored in cardboard boxes stacked on top of tables. I don’t think they ever sold anything, but that was their family business. It was never open, and when you walked by the grimy storefront windows, the items in the windows and the prices had not changed for years. A pair of boots. A hat. Things like that.
Manny was known to everyone in town, because he was the only one who ever left the house. My dad told me he had once been brilliant and went to MIT, but had a nervous breakdown, and ever since then he was as we saw him. He was Jewish, in his sixties, and he could be seen walking up and down Main Street. He walked hunched over, never looking anywhere except straight in front of him. He always had the fingers of his right hand inserted up to his thumb into the front of his trousers with his elbow jutting out, as if he had an abdominal hernia he was holding in or something.
He would pick up trash off of the street and carry it with him. He never talked, never looked at anyone, never stopped except to pick up that trash. He was the target of kids who would mock him, and they would throw things at him from cars as they passed. At school, you could see the occasional kid making fun of him by walking like him. Basically, the town was afraid of him and his family and made them the butt of jokes. As a kid, I occasionally did it too, sad to say.
But my dad would have none of it. When we were in the yard, raking leaves or doing anything else and Manny would walk by, my dad would call out “Hello Manny! How are you?” Manny never looked, never acknowledged him, never slowed down, just kept going.
But my dad would make a point of speaking to him every single time without fail. When I asked him once if he was friends with Manny, and if so, why didn’t Manny ever answer, my dad just looked at his back retreating up the street and said something like “That’s just the way he is.” He said he had never had a conversation with him in all those years.
One Thanksgiving, we had the entire family at the Morel homestead. Aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, children and grandchildren. There were probably 35 of us. My dad and I were out in the front yard talking, and Manny went scurrying by as I had seen him do a thousand times before. My dad called out “Happy Thanksgiving, Manny!”
To my utter and complete astonishment, Manny suddenly did a 90 degree pivot, walked over to my dad and began talking to him. I think my mouth must have been hanging open.
My dad asked Manny if he didn’t have any plans, would he like to join us for Thanksgiving dinner? When Manny said yes, I swear my jaw hit the ground. This was unbelievable. You can only imagine how the REST of the family felt!
Manny was the perfect gentleman, didn’t say a word that I heard, just sat there and ate. We were all sneaking glances at him, I am sure. From that day on, as my dad would call out to him, Manny would turn his head an imperceptible fraction of a degree that you would never even notice if you weren’t watching, and he would do a swift wave of his free hand, just a little wiggle in the air.
Amazing. Years later, when Manny got sick and was in a rehab, I went with my dad to see him. My dad had stroke shortly after that, and ended up in that same rehab, never to walk or speak again.
Then there was another guy named Jimmy. Jimmy was another unfortunate cast away from the town. He was a severe alcoholic, was slightly mentally handicapped (I think) and worst of all, had survived some kind of terrible disfiguring oral cancer where they had to remove some large part of his jaw, lips and face so the poor man was terribly disfigured. People shunned him because he was so wretched and disfigured. Kids made fun of this poor man as well, but I can say that I never did. I always felt an enormous pity for this unfortunate man. You would often see him, blind drunk, sitting on a curb all by himself with that skinny gangly frame of his, a simple plaid shirt, cuffed pants and worn, dirty oxfords. His disfigured chin would bob up and down, eventually coming to rest on his chest, where it would stay. What a poor, piteous man he was. It brings tears to my eyes to remember him.
My dad ran a large boarding house downtown, and had a room for him there. He got him a job at the bank where he worked as an operations manager (Baybanks Harvard Trust in Harvard Square) and every single day, my dad would drive downtown, pick Jimmy up and drive him into Boston with him. At night, my dad would make sure Jimmy got to the AA meeting.
When I watched these things back then, I didn’t give it a second thought. “Oh, dad is saying hello to the weirdos next door...” or “Yep, there goes dad downtown on his way to work to pick up Jimmy...”
When I look at it now, I see something completely different. I see a man, a kind, compassionate man who reached out to people nobody else would reach out to. He didn’t do it so that someone would say “Isn’t Al a great guy?’ and he didn’t do it in the hope that it would help him get into heaven when he died.
He did it because he saw men who were not as lucky or fortunate as him, and never would be. I think it was his way of thanking God for giving him such a great life and a great family. What a man.
I miss him so. Happy Father’s day, Dad. I love you.
re: 42
a hearty AMEN!
I wish I could find the words to express my gratitude...I can not.
What a WONDERFUL Dad God gave you...you probably (we ALL probably!) have “Manny’s” in our own lives...and how blessed we would be to follow your Dad’s simple way of loving them.
God bless you, rlmorel...thank you...
I think you've already been out there...you had a daughter working an internship in the area, I believe.
Aw, shucks, MA...
You’re so much better than any of us deserve.
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