Fathers Day coincided with the family vacation this year and maybe more than some years I had the time to think a little on being a father. Thinking about the gleeful giggle of my oldest daughter when you she sees through my tricks and the devious and delightful cackle of my youngest daughter when she manages some trick of her own. Truly there can be no finer task for a man than to be a father. I hope, as I suppose all fathers do, for my children to grow up with all of my strengths and none of my weaknesses, to do better in life than I did, and to raise their own children in a way that takes the best of their own childhood and adds to it. It’s a task that makes me wish I was better than I am. It’s a task done with the grown up understanding that my own father wasn’t perfect, that I have all of his strengths and only a few of his weaknesses, and that the ways I choose to be different do nothing to diminish who he was or what he gave to me. I wish he had lived to see my daughters, how he would have beamed! I wish I had done more for him on Fathers Day to say thank you and I know as a father that I’d never want my own children to worry about such a thing. I think about having lunch with my daughters every weekend and can’t think of a better life.
