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Honoring Fathers and Sons:
Expressions
Freeing the
Universal
We lay in the grass under the "41
Merc
working on the rusted universal,
twisting for a
comfortable place to reach from in the dark.
Dad, balances
the crescent wrench
on the cross-member above his head,
telling me to hold the trouble light
in a way that
would let him see.
As he taps the frozen
joint,
rust flakes from the axle;
bits of road dirt and
dead leaves fall
into our eyes. This is how I explain the
tears.
I want to ask him how things work
or
why they don't, but already know
he will not answer.
The shadows
have grown so deep, even
our loneliness is
invisible.
Our hands are full of tools
and light and
still we can not reach
across the quiet between hammer
blows.
So when the ball-peen fails on
seized metal,
and he turns to look up, I swallow my
warning.
The wrench flashes, falling between the
lamp
and the moon of his face.
Our silences, rooted in
such small moments of fear
turn through our lives like ball
bearings
spinning around drive shafts,
individual and
locked in place,
barely touching,
and above us the
great weight
that will not move.
Michael Macklin
Dad,
You died when you
were fifty nine and I was thirty three. I'm seventy one
now and carry your love and wounds with me, even over the
years I've outlived you. The issues imprinted on our
psyches do travel through the generations. You wrestled
with the blessings and curses of previous generations and
passed them on to me. I've passed them on to my children
and on they go. I'm not you but your unresolved anger
issues live in me. Your deep capacity to love lives in
me. Your struggle to "be a man" lives in me as you did
your best and worst to make me a man. I'm not you but
you live in me.
When you died I
spoke at your memorial service out of my grief, admiration and
confusion saying "He was a good man, not a perfect man."
And, I trust, the same can be said of me when my turn comes.
I do, did
love you.
Bill
To My Son Aubrey
Samuel Young,
On the occasion of the birth of my second son
Daniel Bernard Young:
Life is a gamble,
full of risks which are inherent. Every breath you take is one
step closer to your last. Similarly, every moment I've
chosen to know and love you I feel the burn that I will have
to let you go. The beauty of life is in the uniqueness and
preciousness of each moment, but that beauty is also very
scary and overwhelming at times. My challenge to you, my son,
is to not shrink back in the shadow of this beauty. I want you
to approach it with reckless abandon, and say to yourself, and
all who can hear you, "I will not be afraid to love...giving
is worth the risk".
You have helped me
realize and appreciate this fact. I am learning it as I am
saying it, and I pray you will help me teach it to your sister
and brother.
I love you.
Your
Dad,
Damon (age 29)
Sunsets and
Scotch
Lyrics to a
song...
I
watched you look across the lake
The waters rippled by a
passing wake,
You looking out for looking's sake
As the
sun fell from the sky.
In your boat you might
forget,
The expectations never met
And I had noticed in
your eyes-
A look I thought I recognized.
The sky's on fire as the world
turns round
So was your throat as the scotch went
down.
Sunsets and scotch have that golden glow
One of
them took your life real slow...
In the end you looked so thin,
Your body ravaged from within
Still you'd go out on the
deck
The progress of the sun you'd check.
So many things you did hide,
A
prisoner of your manly pride,
The scotch helped keep it all
inside
Til it ate too much away.
Now the sun
goes down alone
As God has gone and called you home,
I
think I'll go out on the deck,
The progress of the sun I'll
check.
David, age
50
How I hope not to be like
you...
You
weren't there during my first surgery, the surgery that has
scarred me for life. You weren't there when I waited on
the porch for you. You weren't there when you left me in
the car, waiting as you got drunk. You are selfish and
weak. You say you love me, yet your actions say something
else. I am here. Where are you? Why does the son
have to seek the father? I fear I will end up being like
you: divorced and sad. I understand your pain, but you
still had choices. And I choose to be like me, not
you. As the last male of our family, I choose to bring
hope and love to our name, a name that my son will be proud to
share and hold. Under all of the disappointment I have
in you, I love you. Why, I am not sure, maybe because I am
like you just with different situations and a different
environment.
Brandon, age 29
To my son
Tate,
As you
have become older, now on your way to middle school, you have
become mature enough to sometimes question decisions I make in
parenting you. I anticipate that as 11 years becomes 12, and
12 becomes 13, those questions will accumulate and
intensify.
You will learn and learn again that
your father is imperfect, as all fathers are. You will
note mistakes on my part, and to a degree there will be some
satisfaction in this for you; that is a big part of growing
up. But through it all, I imagine, you will never wonder
about my commitment to you, about my motivation in parenting
you the way I do, about my love for you. That love is a
constant, even if there are many variables in the day-to-day
communication that exist in a father-son relationship,
particularly between an adolescent and a man going into his
40's. And when you are older, that's what will remain as
the clearest message from these years, that love. I know
this from experience.
Love,
Your
Father Jon, age 39
Dad,
I
think of you nearly every day. I miss you so much. We
went through so many revisions in our lives, you the stressed
out physician, me the doting son, me the athlete, you the
doting dad (me embarrassed). I cannot hike without thinking
about you; you brought the mountains and the outdoors into my
life and I taught you how to hug. You were part of the
"greatest generation," but tried to understand my
opposition to war. I see you in my bumbling obsessions,
and in my raucous party voice. You honored education and
hated waste. You were a contradiction, as am I. I
was blessed to know you those last years. People who knew
you well really loved you, as did I.
You are ever in my
heart,
Chuck
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