As I sneak my Father’s Day post just under the wire this year…

The following is from a Father’s Day meditation I posted two years ago:

My father’s not a loud man, not one to boast, even when he’s right and everyone else is pretty much wrong. In my youth I mistook his humility for weakness, but now I realize that the measured approach he took with life’s little twists and turns is what helped him not turn and run when times were tough. He taught me, among other things, that love requires humility (sometimes even humiliation) and that strength is more often demonstrated through patience than through brute force.

He has always been on the quieter side of things, revealing a sense of manhood that can’t be mimicked with the chest-beating machismo so often mistaken for manliness. Physically, he’s always been a strong man, but his intellectual depth and perspective are what have impressed me most as I’ve grown older, and some might even say, wiser.

Or in the words of Robert Hayden: (more…)

Tags: father’s day, Robert Hayden poetry, Those Winter Sundays

“I’m thinking of a word that has been knocked up and over-used.
You could say it’s lost all meaning from so much abuse.”
-Over the Rhine

First the girl.

She was eternally sunny, like the summer afternoon I made her acquaintance on a rural hillside. She was driven by passion, but still slightly guarded. She noticed things that other people didn’t, and she wrote them down – she said it was just to remember. As opposed to me. I wrote things down partly to remember, but also to exhaust the mental faucet that ran forever in my head (- if they were the demons, writing them down was a sort of exorcism).

She wove craft bracelets and necklaces, she wore pants referred to as “clam diggers” and she re-animated crinkled straw wrappers with a drop of soda while sitting in the seventh row of any given movie theater.

I thought she was a distraction, but she became a friend. One that would weave in and out of my life for the next half of it. read more