Thanks, Dad…

“A father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he meant to be”.
-Frank A. Clark

In a touching scene from my favorite movie, Forrest Gump, Forrest learns that his mother is sick and in characteristic fashion, runs home from his work as a shrimp fisherman to be with her. Sitting bedside, his mother tells him that she is dying. When Forrest asks why, she reassures the simple-minded Gump that death is just a part of life, something we are all destined to do. At the end of the scene, she poignantly adds, “I didn’t know it Forrest, but I was destined to be your Mama. I did the best I could…”

And so it is with fathers. Flawed as they often are, fathers show up to work, bring home the bacon, and love in their own quiet way. Fathers are that stern voice that makes children take notice, the very bedrock on which order in the family rests. They are like a feather of destiny, floating on a breeze, just doing the best job possible to land softly on a few great moments in life.

For me, those greatest of moments were when my Dad spent time with me and took me fishing, a sport in which he never participated on his own, but nonetheless made the time for because he loved me. He bought me gifts for fishing, took me on fishing trips, and most of all, gave me life and tucked into it a marvelous little gene that has always drawn me to water…

Fathers of yore often take a bad wrap for old-fashioned values, but I grow more fearful with every Father’s Day that these same values are being lost to us and have been diluted to the point that Father’s Day itself is on its own bad course with destiny.

I look at my own two sons, standing so close to the line that separates man and boy and hope I have given them what my Dad gave me;  that sense that being a father is doing the best you can do with what you have, and hoping they can be as good a man as you meant to be…

Thanks, Dad…