father's day, 2016

 There's my dad, smiling on another summer day.

Here's Jay and Heidi, 1988.

 Here's a beautiful old photo:

 Jay is the baby on his mom's lap.  Beside him are Meril and Todd, on his dad's lap.

Here's my mother in law's father, John, playing cards with our John.

These are my mother's grandparents, with me on her lap. That's my mother's dad's mom and she and my mom were buddies, loved each other incredibly.

 Oh, there you go, me and Him, my own dad and me back when we were kids.

 My mom's father and my baby brother:

That's Pam in the red tights looking very like my youngest grandchild, me grinning on the right, my dad's father in the middle.

All these beautiful dads--all people a kid could depend on and trust, who worked hard, came home, ate supper, put their money in the joint checking account, paid their bills, and got up again in the morning and did it again.

The world may be a tough place, but they have navigated it well with integrity and a profound sense of decency, buoyed up by all around by a helpful sense of humor.

I wrote this about fifteen years ago, and I still mean every word:

"We want families where all the people can grow together, where we can all seek our potential and be ourselves, where generations overlap, so that we know for certain because we see it with our own eyes, that love is continuous, and extends backward and forward in time. 

It was a foundation underneath our lives long before we were ever born and will continue flowing after we are gone." 

That's Joe on a tube with p.j., a promise he made, though he's not all that aquatic.

Happy Father's Day all these fathers past and present, who have never attempted to tell mothers how to be mothers, who have taken up the pursuit of Fatherhood with serious intention and put their shoulder to the wheel of hard work and attempted to show their kids the ropes in life.

Lucky is what we all are for you.

Thank you for your hard work and care, for laughter.  

Thank you for holding us up by the life jacket and whispering encouraging words into our ears.   

Thank you for your endless hours on the job, for all the bills paid and meals cooked and the loads of laundry folded, the trash cans wheeled to the curb, the bicycles assembled, the Barbies houses put together in the middle of the night, the dogs you helped us housebreak and train, the lofts put together in the dorm, the funny stories, the pancakes, the fried egg sandwiches...

The tire pressure checked, the oil added to the tank, the grandbaby pounce pile, the cheering section--also including that ONE game you got kicked out of for screaming too loudly at the ref.

Lucky.  Lucky for Dads.  

love forever, Val