Category: Reclaiming the Family

Food for Thought

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I have never been a big-time environmentalist.  Now, I believe it’s important to protect the air and water from irresponsible dumping of toxins by industry but I’m also not afraid of chemical and even nuclear materials just because they are hazardous.  We have the technology to harness many of these materials without poisoning ourselves.  So, I’m not a disciple of people like RFK Jr. and I have nothing but scorn for the climate change alarmists like that demented dwarf Greta Thunberg.

But looking around at the state of human health in the year 2024 AD I’m forced to admit that modern life has become extremely unhealthy.  The proportion of the population that is overweight (or even morbidly obese!) is shockingly high.  There is something very wrong with how we live.  So, to the extent that someone is calling attention to this dangerous situation I have to give credit where credit is due.

Over the course of the last fifty years many American presidential administrations have declared “war” on various health threats; cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, you name it.  But the truth is all we ever achieved was to fund government sponsored research facilities that never produced anything approaching actual cures.

But what seems to be clear is the sedentary lifestyle we now lead is killing us.  And not only that, but even before we’ve been finished off by the fat, we are unhealthy and unhappy.  It’s obvious that this situation is the product of more than just one aspect of modern life.  It is caused by the way that we live together (or rather apart), it’s caused by the way we raise our children, how we spend our time and it has to do with how and what we eat.  Almost every aspect of our lives has become less healthy than it was a hundred years ago.

Let’s start by looking at how we live.  A hundred years ago we lived in towns and cities.  But from the smallest village to the largest metropolis people had actual neighborhoods.  Their kids had places to play together.  The children’s mothers could keep an eye on the youngest children while they played together and at least made sure that the older ones were theoretically safe among friends while they roamed the neighborhood looking for some kind of a ballgame to play.  But at least they were outside getting a substantial amount of exercise, instead of just sitting around the house.  Compare that to modern suburbia where most kids now grow up.  Most homes aren’t adjacent to each other on a sidewalk so the kids are isolated from each other and need a parent to bring them to a friend’s house or a playground.  No one walks anywhere.  We sit in our cars.  But there aren’t any parents around to drive them anyway.  Their mothers are now full-time employees of some corporation.  The kids instead spend their time inside the house playing video games on their “phone” and eating whatever snack food has been left around the house to sedate them.  This leaves them lonely, socially inept and obese.

And what happens to these kids when they grow up.  If they’re lucky enough to get jobs it’s probably in a cubicle where they’ll get no exercise other than walking to a cafeteria once or twice a day to eat a highly processed meal made from some combination of high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fat and cardboard.  To be perfectly fair I think we’re actually surviving this regimen better than should be expected.  Laboratory rats are given a more humane existence than what we have relegated ourselves to.

The solution to our problems is some combination of reclaiming the family and urban planning.  We need to get women back to raising children.  And we need to build communities that allow neighborhoods to exist for the majority of people.  As far as food, a meaningful analysis of the health risks for processed foods should be scientifically run.  I think forcing the CEOs of food manufacturing corporations to ingest their own products should be stringently applied and the impact on their health and longevity carefully studied.  But in addition to that meaningful guidelines should be published and warning labels should be affixed to the packaging of any of the most dangerous products.

And I think we all need to start walking a lot more.  And if we had a neighborhood to walk in, we’d even probably have to talk with our neighbors more than once a year.  And if we did that, we might even talk about all the problems around town and what we want done about them instead of just complaining about the politicians we don’t bother to vote for.

What would it take to make these changes?  A great majority of Americans would have to want these changes and then they’d have to elect leaders who cared whether we live or die.  So, of course, none of these things will ever happen.  Instead think of how you can make these things happen for yourself and your children.  You would have to marry a woman who wants to raise her children from home.  Then you would have to work hard enough to afford this “luxury.”  Then you would have to buy a house in a town or city that still had safe neighborhoods.  And finally, you would have to do research to make healthy choices with respect to food and lifestyle (exercise).

That’s a tall order.  But it’s food for thought.

Updates:

Milo Mindbender commented:

There is a meme regarding the fact the there comes a “last day to play with your friends” and you will not know that it happened until afterwards.
My generation circa 65, mostly stock, some aftermarket parts installed played outside, drank hose water, had fewer than 10 channels of TV, watched bugs Bunny drop anvils, yosemite sam carry guns, and a coyote chase a road runner forever without success. We knew what we couldn’t do in real life, and was cartoon, but we played anyway.
We were taught about a food pyramid that actually looked more like a finishing diet for hogs, ate what we wanted, rode our BMX bikes everywhere, and had no guilt about global affairs.
Children today are gifted with generational guilt by their parents, teachers, and both public and social media. We crushed them before they developed into functional beings, added out phobias, and psychosis to the mix, and to make ourselves as a society feel better plastered over the cracks with SSRI type meds to conceal we were trying to adult the children before they were ready for it.
Similar to a vegan cat, or a teams toddler we were ready to teach the youth that they were recipient of a bounty they didn’t deserve and needed to be guilty as charged, my children were not allowed video games, and they were teenagers before we got Internet or a computer. They grew up gloriously feral, and are now still relatively socially maladjusted, but healthy physically, if not mentally according to society. They got home cooked meals, and played outside weather permitting, with no siren call of cable to keep them indoors, there was less off a fight to get them outside. My grandchildren are sofar following the same direction and I don’t feel that this is a bad thing. Feral children are more interested in the world around them that sedated, and electronically stimulated zombie children can be, because they look at and into what’s around them instead of the screen.

War Pig commented:

The preservation of foods was a great boon which allowed us to eat fruits and veggies year round and curing meat greatly extended its edible life. But overprocessing said food, especially the junk ingredients used to do it are most of the problem. Bread used to be flour, milk or water, yeast, a dab of sugar to get the yeast happy and maybe butter. And we kept the starter for our sourdough around as sourdough bread is good for us. Now I read the ingredients on bread and cannot pronounce most of them. My brother’s wife has the starter grandma used. She divided it and distributed it out among the family before she passed. Supposedly it came from Germany with our ancestors in 1820 or so. How old it really is, is unknown. It may be well over 200 years.

The Tale of the Two Jakes

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So, after yesterday’s doom and gloom post I was glad that today we were out of the house for something a lot less depressing.  We were picking up Princess Sack of Potatoes for a sleep over.  And before coming home we watched her team’s weekly soccer game.  Now any parent knows that five- and six-year-olds playing soccer consists mostly of a scrum of eight or ten kids in a circle kicking the ball back and forth at each other’s shin guards.  Luckily at this stage of my career as a soccer spectator all I’m looking for is a lack of drama from the parents and at least one goal for “our side.”

And the soccer gods were smiling down on us today and “our side” got most of the goals.  But more accurately the Two Jakes got almost all the goals.  And it was something of a doppelganger experience.  Each team had a little boy named Jake.  And each Jake was probably about four feet tall with closely cropped dirty blond hair, the number “4” on his jersey and a monomaniacal drive to get the ball in the goal.  These two boys were the only players on the field who knew how to dribble the soccer ball and this allowed them to dominate the ball until faced by a wall of opponents.

Luckily for our side, their coach had drilled them all to run for the goal if the other team got the ball and this allowed us to effectively limit their Jake to two goals.  Unfortunately for the other team, their coach hadn’t equipped them with this strategy so our Jake had the opportunity to score about a half dozen goals.

Other than the coincidences of name, number and appearance there is nothing unusual about two teams at this age only having one competent striker.  But the reason I mention this situation has to do the with the boys’ fathers.  Because they were both cheering on their sons with the same name, they caught each other’s attention and began a conversation that I could overhear.

And it was a pleasant surprise to hear them both comparing notes on their sons’ drive to score goals.  Both of them complimented the other on their son’s skills and both seemed to disclaim having anything to do with it.  You could tell they were both a little proud but neither was at all wound up while watching the game and there wasn’t any of the embarrassing sidelines haranguing that is so awful to see at these games.  There was plenty of applause and cheering when goals were scored (or missed) but both of them behaved as adults watching very young children play a game.  Compared to the behavior of so many parents at these events, it was a breath of fresh air.

And that provided me with just enough hope for humanity to shake off the grim shadow of life in Joe Biden’s America for today.  When we got home, I spent a little time talking about the game with my granddaughter and discovered that for her the most important things about the game were that they had scored at least one goal and that they got to buy something from the ice cream truck.  And in retrospect her priorities seem about right.

But it was nice to see two grown men behaving like grown men.  Maybe that leads to two more grown men a generation from now.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 09SEP2024 – Finding Significance Redux

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war pig

One of my favorites is Ahab’s soliloquy spoken by Gregoey Peck on the bridge of the Pequod.

I do not have the funds to make great changes. No political power, no influence except among family who respect my opinions. I believe there is too much money In politics already, so I do not contribute to political parties or candidates except for a cousin of mine who is a county trustee.

Instead, I offer the party or candidate something totally above price. My vote. It cannot be bought as I would not sell it for millions, therefore it is beyond value. I earned my franchise through blood, sweat and pain. It is priceless to me.

As for social media, I eschew it. My private life is mine and I do not care to share it with strangers. I also do not care about their lives so no reason to join social media. I don’t want to see pictures of their restaurant meals, etc. I find no attraction in trying to gain approval from strangers by amassing likes. There are a few for whom I care about their opinions. Mostly my close relatives and a very few brothers in arms.

We really need to lower our population back down to about 150 million. We’re beginning to act like an experimental overcrowded rat colony.

Finding Significance

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Regular readers know that I admire, perhaps excessively, a small number of well-known literary works.  Shakespeare has several of my favorites.  But there are gems scattered throughout western literature from the Iliad on.  And of course, there’s the Bible.

I’ve always admired this speech from Macbeth:

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

 

These are the words of a man who has come to believe that life is meaningless.  But it’s really a rationalization for the results of murdering his own conscience.  He was describing the hell he had created and that soon would engulf him permanently.

And I find this idea instructive.  I think if you keep in mind that there is a moral order, then it gives you a sense of perspective.  You can be surrounded by evil and forced to deal with the worst of humanity.  But if you can work to preserve the things that are good then you can have some peace in knowing you are giving meaning to human life.  And that’s not nothing.

Despair is a godless pleasure that we’re not allowed to imbibe.  You have to work to make this crazy world of ours better.  Certainly, we are currently seeing a diminution in the state of our world.  The morals, the morale, the wisdom of our society is draining away in a shocking way.

And that’s alarming.  But it’s far from the first time and it’s probably not the worst example on record.  It’s important to keep things in perspective and act reasonably.  We will be surrounded for the foreseeable future by people who have bought into the current narrative.  This includes all kinds of very harmful ideas and practices.  The results of this are the excesses of our culture; confusion over things like the roles of men and women and the importance of traditional practices in living our lives and raising our children.

We can instill meaning and purpose into our actions and interactions with each other by choosing carefully to perform the actions that improve our surroundings and make us better people.  And this is especially important in our relations with the young.  They are growing up in a world that has been stripped of reason and dignity.  They spend their every waking minute immersed in a world of TikTok influencers and other phony celebrities telling them what they should think and what they should value.  It’s a wonder they haven’t all been degraded down to the status of sub-human idiots.  I feel it’s especially important to enrich the lives of the young people in my life with things that nourish and expand their minds and souls.  There is the meaning that we can find; keeping this world from falling into a new dark age.

Life is brief but it is a tale told by whatever truth you have in your heart.  If it signifies nothing then that is what is in your soul.

A Sense of Wonder

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My recent foray into Dunwichian power politics may have struck some of my readers as morose and unnecessarily pessimistic.  Possibly so, but I was trying to capture the essence of our current reality where an honest and transparent analysis of how our society works reveals enormous hypocrisy.  And the nature of our “democracy” reveals itself to be a process manipulated by the powerful who have no regard for the people.  But just to show you I haven’t despaired of life I was reminded today of what good can be achieved by getting involved with the young.

I remembered as a youngster being intrigued by astronomy.  Maybe it was because of the space program that was getting off the ground about the time I became aware of current events.  Maybe it was because my parents gave me access to books and other resources concerning science.  But however it happened, I was fascinated by the details of the solar system.  I was always reading statistics about the size, location and physical attributes of Saturn and Jupiter, Mercury and Mars.  And once I began reading science fiction, I became all the more absorbed by this extension of my world into the solar system.  And I suppose that my early interest in science is responsible for much of my orientation in school and afterwards.  Engineering was the logical conclusion for someone interested in the practical application of science to life.  I suppose that if NASA’s space program hadn’t petered out after the moon landings, I would have tried to get involved in an engineering program that had the potential of involving space travel but that was just a childhood fantasy.

But remembering how exciting and interesting it was to discover the larger universe, I decided to give Princess Sack of Potatoes her first astronomy lesson.  We looked at photos of the planets and I tried to explain some of the physical characteristics of the various worlds that circle our sun.  Mercury and Venus are too close to the Sun and therefore too hot.  Mars is too small and too far from the Sun and therefore lacking a useful atmosphere and too cold.  And I tried to explain why the gas giant worlds weren’t places where terrestrial life could exist because of their nightmarish temperatures and pressures and poisonous atmospheres.

So was my lesson successful.  I don’t really know.  She seemed interested enough and she enjoyed the colorful photos and pictures of the planets.  But will it inspire a deep curiosity about the universe.  Well, it’s much too soon to tell.  Maybe after we begin to discuss interstellar and intergalactic space I’ll see if she becomes bored with the subject.  But there was definitely one moment of planetary solidarity.  When we had finished with Neptune, she wanted to know what had happened to Pluto.  Full disclosure, I was very angry when the international astronomical societies stripped Pluto of its status as a planet.  I felt it to be an arbitrary and probably anti-American gesture.  So, this sympathy for Pluto by my granddaughter was a very welcome occurrence.  When I found out that this emotion was fostered because the planet has the same name as Mickey Mouse’s dog, I was a little less enthusiastic.  But still, when dealing with small children you take your victories where they come.

So, teaching children and inspiring curiosity about the wonders of science is something that we can do even in the world of Joe Biden and the American Security State.  One small step for a grandfather, one giant leap for mankind.

Is a Hive Existence the Future for Humanity?

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You could say that socialism is the evolution of human society.  Ever since the Neolithic larger and larger groups of humans have been adapting their lives to the advantages and disadvantages of “civilization.”  Other than some tribes living in the Amazon jungle or the New Guinean highlands humanity has abandoned the hunter gatherer and nomad lifestyles for civilization that allows for agriculture, permanent settlements, scientific innovation and the joys of income tax.

Ever since the first “city” in Sumer began dictating how the fertile crescent would be fertile and how the Sumerian farmers would pay their tithe to the great god Enki we have lived in a continuously more regimented society that slowly but surely has begun to resemble an ant hive.

Now, from time to time there have been revolts.  Chiefly these have consisted of nomads swooping down and ransacking the ant-hive.  The last big example was the Germanic sack of the Roman Empire.  The various Goths, Vandals, Franks and Lombards turned the checker board of civilized life over for good and proper sometime in the mid-400s AD.  These pastoral barbarians not only burned and pillaged the various cities of Western Europe but they set the cause of insectoid existence back a thousand years.  But here we are fifteen hundred years later and evolution has made incredible strides.  The hive has been modernized, mechanized and now automated beyond the wildest dreams of priests, bureaucrats, or even Aldous Huxley.  Even in his science fictional brave new world Huxley at least maintained the conventional male/female dichotomy and sex roles.  In our factual brave new world, the “scientists” aren’t as technically proficient as the ones in Huxley’s tale but they can still do a lot of damage with some hormones and a scalpel.  And since the objective isn’t to build a functional genetically engineered human ant hive but rather to cull the herd down to a controllable size, the results of their modifications don’t have to be eugenic, just not immediately lethal.  And add in all the other programming that has been used to discourage the young from family formation and you have a considerable effort being expended to make this a truly brave new world.

But is this really our future?  Are we going to be whittled down to small “sustainable” population of “alphas” to be the royal caste and the rest of the population will be a manageable number of workers who will toil their lives away without leaving a trace after them?

Despite the resources and organizational control that our betters possess I find it improbable.  I think it’s more likely that some less advanced but more motivated people will manage to upend this system just as the tribesmen did to the Romans all those years ago.  Maybe it’ll be the Mexican cartels or maybe it’ll be some nation state that doesn’t want to be globalized out of existence.  But whoever it is, the imperative to be human will outcompete the logic of the hive.  Turning humans into cyphers may work for Amazon.com and Google but only because we haven’t been driven to the wall yet.  There will come a time when it becomes apparent to the more intelligent that we are being driven to extinction for the sake of the convenience of the few.  At that point, resistance will occur and hopefully the insects will lose.  If not, “Long live the Queen!”

Don’t Let Them See You Sweat

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There are all kinds of men in this world.  They vary in temperament, intelligence, philosophy, habits, health and any number of other traits.  And likewise with women.  They come in infinite variety.  Most notably of late is their level of allegiance to the feminist project.  So, they run the gamut from strident man-hating lesbians and cat ladies all the way to the maternal heroine of the Victorian novel who lives to help her children and dotes on her husband.

But one thing I’ve noticed about all women.  When the bottom drops out of the world and the Huns are at the gate even the most misandric harpy that ever railed against the patriarchy runs around in circles screaming for the cavalry to arrive.  And just to be specific they expect the cavalry to be steeped in testosterone and bearing Y-chromosomes.

The best example of this that I can remember was directly after September 11th 2001.  Maureen Dowd was and is a journalist for the New York Times and she has spent decades banging the drum for feminist complaints about men.  Her contempt for men in general and conservatives in particular was limitless.  But then the Towers were knocked down in September and suddenly policemen, firemen and soldiers were the heroes she wanted to write about.  Suddenly she realized that the only thing standing between her and the primitive world that is held in check by modernity is a man with a gun.  Of course, eventually she calmed down and realized that men with guns tend not to be feminists.  And she returned to her default contempt.  But for as long as she was scared, she wanted to be comforted by the knowledge that the patriarchy was keeping her safe.

And that impulse to look to the man with a gun is programmed into her DNA.  She won’t admit it because it makes her seem like someone who can’t push aside sex-linked traits as if they were just “social constructs.”  And it’s more than just protection from the Hun.  Whatever the catastrophe, when the bottom drops out a woman looks to her man to make things whole again.  And that’s all women.  The good ones are grateful.  The dishonest ones pretend they could have done it on their own.  They may even pretend they did.

But when Armageddon arrives, and you’re busy trying to figure out how to save the day, it’s good to remember that the women folk often need some kind of sign from you that you can save the day.  And here the female psyche should be taken into consideration.  Because even if there’s nothing that you can think of to do the best strategy is to appear to be doing something constructive.  I am convinced that a fretful woman who sees her man engaged in physical activity with tools of whatever kind; mechanical, diagnostic or even just a wheelbarrow will take solace from the idea that he is taking the lead and solving the problem.  And it doesn’t hurt if he assigns her some role to play in the “brilliant plan” that he is already putting into motion.

Camera Girl, even Camera Girl is not immune from this behavior.  She that has shared my life for almost half a century; knows me right down to my toes.  And she knows just how lazy and lethargic I am by nature.  But when I can see that something serious has scared her, then I know it’s time for me to do my best Superman impression and let her know that I have a way to make everything whole again.  Of course, most times I don’t and maybe I’m kind of scared myself.  But admitting that is a big mistake.  Morale is a very important part of life and if you let the family morale crack, things get even tougher.

So that’s my insight.  I recently saw an example of this that reminded me of this dynamic.  I thought it might be useful information for others.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 21JUL2024 – Grandparenting Right

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Me and my brother still remember things our grandparents did and talk about them often. Things we did that got us in trouble but they helped so we got off. Both of our grandpa’s were ornery and mischievous and liked to play tricks on us. Both grandma’s were loving and soothed our small injuries and fed us to stuffing. We even had one greatgrandmother who lived long enough for us to remember. She was an easy mooch and always had marshmallow peanuts, candy orange slices and soft peppermints. She was an amazing character, too. Smoked a clay pipe that got so hot I had to use tongs to touch it. Every morning she put liquid HEET on her hands to loosen up the arthritis. I got a drop of it on me and I had to run to the sink and use cold water to wash it off. Felt like molten glass had landed on me.

I’m gonna have to write all the stories down for my grandson.

Pay Back for Paying Forward

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Two thirds of July burned through.  But we got the sun and heat the calendar promised.  So, I can’t kick.

Swimming pools are an awful nuisance to the owner especially if he lives in the north.  The winter weather beats the hell out of the polymers that the liner and the filter loop are made out of.  In every practical sense they’re a bad deal.  A dead loss except for one very important aspect.  They attract grandchildren like no other power on Earth.  To paraphrase “Field of Dreams,” “If you fill it, they will come.”  Like a law of nature, a hot summer week, a swimming pool and youngsters react like iron filings to a magnet.

And that’s great.  Provide the pool, some burgers and lemonade and they’ll swim and dive and splash around until their fingers and toes become as wrinkled as prunes.  But why, you might ask, would anyone want to have a bunch of noisy, boisterous, unruly kids around when peace and quiet is so much easier?

Well, the answer is simple.  Grandchildren are the one and only, absolutely authentic, sure-fire fountain of youth that has ever been discovered by mankind.  When you steal away their children away from your children and spoil them rotten with bilious food and frivolous activities; like throwing around a baseball or letting them play a game of hide and seek in your yard, it’s as if you’ve stepped into a time machine.

When you referee their squabbles and join in their silly card games and argue with them about whether T-Rex is stronger than Spinosaurus or whether a dragon that breathes fire is more powerful than one that breathes ice or when they draw birthday cards for you with all the care and concentration that a five-year-old can muster you are transported to a different world.  A much, much better world.

Getting to spend time with your grandkids is the payoff for all the years of work and worry that goes into raising a family.  We try to spend as much time with our kids as we can but work consumes so much of our time.  And worrying about getting them launched into their adult lives steals away so much of the time you have when you’re in the prime of your life.

So having the chance to really experience the small joys of children at play in your later years is imbibing the quintessence of life.  And it makes the prospect of getting old acceptable.  Our mortality is THE fact of life.  We get a span of time on this giddy rock hurtling through space-time.  And sooner than any of us imagine, the sands start building up in the bottom of the hour-glass.  But if we see children and then grandchildren and maybe great-grandchildren; well then, we can feel as if we did our part to keep this crazy, confusing, hopelessly conflicted endeavor called the human race staggering down the road for at least another generation or two.  And if after we’re gone they think back on us and smile about something we said or did, well, that’s one kind of immortality.

And that has to be enough to make the whole thing worthwhile.  Because as far as I can tell, that’s about as good as it gets.  And that’s good enough for me.

Father’s Day – 2024 – Crashing Plaster and Pancakes

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And the rolling year has once again brought us back to that most equivocal of fake holidays, “Father’s Day.”  When I say fake, I mean that it’s a manufactured occasion that has no long history of celebration.  Its equivocal nature is owed to the mixed feelings that everyone in a family feels about dear old Dad.  Well, at least that’s my own point of view.

And this is based on my own father and the way he raised his six sons.  Basically, it was like some kind of anthropological experiment that was started out with the best of intentions but then went horribly off the rails and eventually completely overwhelmed the investigators and had to be recast as a cautionary tale for all involved.

A more beleaguered man has never walked the face of the Earth.  He was always outnumbered, outgunned, behind the times, short of resources and out of patience.  I don’t remember him getting through a single day in that house without screaming and hollering at several or all of us.  We were terrible kids.

We broke everything he owned.  We lost every tool he possessed and we caused at least one disaster a week.  His house was perpetually on the edge of crumbling into something resembling the debris piles seen in old footage of London after the Blitz.  When leaks would develop in the house’s flat roof his solution was to use a hand drill on the ceiling to direct the leak and put a bucket under it.  His idea was that by tapping the leak it would prevent it from soaking the whole plaster ceiling and have it collapse onto us while we were sleeping.

He had a steam heat system which perpetually leaked at all of the radiators.  And he battled this problem by attempting to use string and grease to seal the threads of the pipe joints.  But the threads were so stripped that this never accomplished much of anything.  But he soldiered on with the hope that one day he’d catch up with his expenses and have a plumber come in and replace it all.  Finally, the ceiling in the living room underneath the leakiest radiator on the second floor collapsed.  All the plaster crashed down on the living room floor and exposed the wooden laths in the ceiling.  One of my younger brothers was overjoyed and he said aloud, “This will finally force him to fix the ceiling once and for all.”  Well, no.  That ceiling remained in that condition until after my father’s death a number of years later.

So, my example of fatherhood was definitely idiosyncratic.  And as for Father’s Day, if my father could have had his wish on that day, it would have been to lock us all out of the house for the whole day and leave him alone to watch baseball, horse racing and boxing on his tiny, pathetic, black and white, constantly drifting television set.  But that was an impossibility.  We were an omnipresent reminder of his status as Dad.

So, on Father’s Day he often fell back on his only real domestic skill.  He could make pancakes and French toast by the imperial ton.  And in that house, he had to.  He bought the cheapest pancake mix and syrup he could find in bulk containers.  I always imagined that he got it from war surplus.  And when pancake day arrived, he’d cover all the burners on the stove with griddles and he would cook and we would eat stacks of pancakes until we couldn’t move.  It was probably the high point of our lives together.  For that brief time, we were all happy simultaneously and we were all well fed which rarely otherwise occurred.

So maybe Father’s Day should be like that.  A day when Dad should find something he knows he can do that makes the whole family admit that he’s good for something other than paying the bills.  Anyway, it’s a thought.