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

ON WORDS

“Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness.”

-Rumi-

Perfectly good food discarded when 'neighbors' fled to destinations unknown

Some view anything deemed sacred as belonging to 'god', and resist using the word for that reason. 

A woman selling her art on West 23rd street, NYC

Others embrace the word for the same reason.

 Priced at three for twenty dollars

I use the word 'sacred' to denote something or some one worthy of honor.  Consequently, to my understanding, everything and every one is sacred.  Then, what about good and evil, pain and pleasure, suffering and liberation?   

Pictures on an alter at New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care

 

More words with which to indicate an attitude toward something or some one.  Sacred's just a six letter word after all, and all words are mere signifiers, both real and illusory--ultimately inadequate to the tasks of living and dying.

Symbolic blade to sever illusions

Still, we humans struggle to find the right words to describe what's seen and felt.  That's how stories are born.  A 'Beautiful' story is not complete without the darker elements of that story, nor are the darker parts any less 'beautiful'.  

'Liberty' in New York's harbor-2009

Given enough longing and light, having devoured it's own substance, story emerges like a butterfly-unique and brief.

~*~