Sunday, June 18, 2017

DAD

I hardly knew him.
What I knew of him is locked in my childhood.
I was 10 when he died suddenly the day before his fifty first birthday. Here he is at about the same age.
I never saw him in his uniform except in photographs.
He looked like the tiny photograph most of the time.
His loss was a huge trauma for me, my brother and our Mother, but it's just a story now; a dramatic and heart wrenching story I've told in various forms over many decades and one I'm well acquainted with the minute details of. Every year around this time I think of him, our little story and all the stories of fatherless children worldwide.
~*~

Copy pasted from the Writers Almanac some years back because the last line is priceless.....
"Today is Father's Day, a holiday in this country that goes back to a Sunday morning in May of 1909, when a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd was sitting in church in Spokane, Washington, listening to a Mother's Day sermon. She thought of her father, who had raised her and her siblings after her mother died in childbirth, and she thought that fathers should get recognition too. So she asked the minister of the church if he would deliver a sermon honoring fathers on her father's birthday, which was coming up in June, and the minister did. And the tradition of Father's Day caught on, though rather slowly. Mother's Day became an official holiday in 1914; Father's Day, not until 1972. Mother's Day is still the busiest day of the year for florists, restaurants, and long-distance phone companies. Father's Day is the day on which the most collect phone calls are made."


LINKS TO THE PAST
http://mscomfortzone.blogspot.com/2012/06/shooting-stars-and-fireflies.html 

http://mscomfortzone.blogspot.com/2015/05/personal-memorial.html



3 comments:

jude said...

so different for me. how interesting , our stories.

grace Forrest~Maestas said...

i watch my son and grandson with their children...what a world of
difference from my own experience with my dad...they are so Open,
so outwardly unselfconsciously loving,

Nancy said...

Michelle~ I love hearing your stories. My dad story is complicated. My mom's dad died suddenly when she was just 11 and, like you, it was very hard for her sister and mother and herself. It changed their whole lifestyle. I love that last line too :)