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