#106 - Ghosts of My Father

First off, Happy Father's Day to all of the dads out there.

This Father's Day found me somewhat reflective. First of all, I had to work much of the day. Teresa has been sick for a week, so I've also tried to juggle doing what I can around the house and seeing to her needs. Needless to say, our original plans for the day were definitely subjected to change.

For some reason, this year I also spent some time thinking about my own father who was, in a sense, the father I never knew.

I saw my father for the last time in the spring of 1962, the spring after I turned five. I left to go to kindergarten, and when I got home he was no longer there, at least not physically. But for years, he was always with me.

Perhaps I should say that the idea of my father was always with me since, being five at the time he left, my memories of our time together are not all that plentiful.

At the time, the explanation from my mother was that my father decided he could not handle having a family. So he left. The truth, it turns out, was apparently something much different.

Suffice to say that it appears criminal acts were involved, leading to a stretch in prison. Details, though, are a bit hard to come by fifty years after the fact. What is a fact is that for years I blamed myself for my father's departure because I had no other story to fall back on.

Beyond that, however, I think that I never really learned how to be a son. In some ways, I think I tried to grow up at age five, when I wasn't really ready to be grown up.

The flip side of that is that is that I never really learned how to apply the lessons and experiences that come from a father-son relationship when I became a father. As a child without a father to bond with, I withdrew and became somewhat distant as a means of protecting myself.

The result is that I sometimes have trouble getting close to my own son. Some of that is that I don't really know how to relate to him sometimes because of his autism. Most of it is my own difficulties in getting close to others.

Now to cut myself a little slack. I think I am a better father to my son than my father was to me. The main reason is that I am still around, so there is always a chance to get it right. We occasionally argue, we sometimes laugh, we each sometimes dig in our heels. But through it all, we are still together in a way my father and I never were - as father and son.

Random Thoughts

My apologies for not having posted in the last few weeks. Allergies have been kicking my butt, not to mention the demands and needs of everyday life as well as the need and desire to get out camping again. Now on to some capsule thoughts.

Half a solution better than none? The Democrats' rules committee has decided how Florida and Michigan should be resolved: seat all of the delegates and give each one half a vote. How's that for half a solution? Hillary wins a moral victory, and Barack keeps most of his lead in delegates. Personally, I think the party should have stuck to its guns and kept the delegations out for breaking the rules. There were ways for moving up the primaries according to the rules, and neither state used them.

Obama leaves church. Barack Obama has decided to leave the church he has called his spiritual home for the past 20 years. Having left a church or two in my time, I know how hard a decision this can be. I also thought he made the right decision in choosing to leave while also showing his integrity and loyalty by resisting the earlier calls for him to leave.

To pod or not to pod. I've been reading a lot of late about podcasting and debating whether to try my hand at it. I'm intrigued by it, and it seems a way to get back to broadcasting of a sort, a field I worked in for a time many moons ago. The questions for me are: what type of podcast to do (I have several ideas), where to host it (also several ideas), and do I have the discipline and the passion to do this? For me, that is probably the biggest question.

My problem is that I am interested in a great many things, but I tend to drift from interest to interest, never staying focused for any length of time. That was part of the reason for the name of this blog; I thought I would be roaming from subject to subject more than I have thus far. Perhaps once the election is over.

One last random thought: if you are a father, as I am, a Happy Father's Day on June 15. If you have a father, pay him a visit. If your father is deceased, remember the good things about him. None of us is perfect, and most of us try to do the best we can whenever we can.