Happy Father's Day

[Rob Hilding]

Here's to all you fathers out there.

Best to you all!!

[fastwin]

+1!!

[Kaveh]

BozcoRob, it was sad seeing your nice post with only one reply, so here I am to help you out 

[Rob Hilding]

Thanks, mang

[IZ]

Enjoyed my first fathers day!

[The Bacon Junkie]

Enjoyed my first fathers day!

[RAT900]

Thanks....yeah pretty sparse pops on this one....so I'll stick something in here about fathers day that may kill this thread for good  

Father's Days

I've never had much use for Father's Day as anything important.....figured there are no entitlements in being a father....just acknowledgements you maybe earn for being what a parent ought to be anyway

I sort of earned Fathers Day nods after a late-start cleaning up my act and accepting my obligations and duties....someone had to step up....I still have the old lawyers invoices and memories of the smells and miseries in seemingly endless days in Family Court securing my children from an ex-wife, a woman who never managed to clear any of her personal hurdles.....

don't ever want my kids to thank me for it...I owed it to those children and the extra two I picked up along the way who now fill my life with reasons to smile and care....even stubborn hearts do grow bigger if given half a chance.

I never looked back to my father with anything remotely resembling appreciation or gratitude,,,,he made a mess of things...lost himself and then lashed out at every single one of his obligations and abandoned them all in a protracted fit of self-pity morphed into rage and anger.

As kids we followed his directionless wandering, kids don't have options and we were also left lost in an emotional and psychological wilderness that we had no way out of when he abandoned us...I have a dead sister and a dying one to attest to our unmapped journey to a place we never knew, much less knew how to get to

He did not earn his annual Hallmark Card moment...or so I thought....maybe it is old age, maybe something else...I cant really put a damn finger on it....but something has put a few chinks into the walls of the chamber housing my dismissive disgust and darkness when it comes to matters of my relationship with my father...tiny cracks casting light into smaller recesses and corners of that large dark void of bad memories...glimmers of light illuminating a few things that were laying dusty and covered with ashes in that chamber...buried.

I had an opportunity to go to Italy this year....the main incentive was that it included a pass through Pompeii....the old Greco-Roman city buried by Mount Vesuvius since AD 79. Antiquity always held a fascination for me...what had gone on before...how far old civilizations had gotten before they went off the rails...all the fascinating trace evidence and forensics left behind for us to study and learn from.

It is all pretty simple about getting lost...lost is when you lose sight of where you have come from...started from....the way forward to a destination needs the location or knowledge of what was left behind and where it was left........a starting point kind of helps when one is plotting a course....seems to work for humans and for societies...and there are a lot of lost examples of both wandering around these days

My father was discharged from the US Army in 1945 after fighting in Europe. In 1947 he was on his way back to the American Academy in Rome to continue his classical studies. He worked in the digs at Pompeii excavating the ruins up by its coliseum. As a little boy I was generally terrified of my father, his anger and brutally levied demands the ambushes of expectations backed by drunken or hang-over beatings that were more abuse than education...

but sometimes he would spend some honest time with me....he would dig out his photos of the excavations, pictures he had taken of Pompeii...what was uncovered in the way of architecture, statuary and the preserved paintings on the walls of the ancient houses depicting the inhabitants, their Gods and the way of life that went on for those people so many centuries before....Gods that had failed them in AD 79 and a way of life that left them all lost.

I was safe with my father during those sparse moments....his voice would change as he would describe what Pompeii was like....a softly spoken residual awe at what they as excavators had uncovered and reasoned-out about the people, places and things preserved so perfectly by a layer of volcanic ash and rubble. He would describe how to pick-out which buildings were of Greek origin and which were of Roman construction...Doric, Ionic and Corinthian pillars and other telltale elements of architecture and construction.

My father saw my fascination and delight...I think my own awe and excited questions warmed him...it was the one thing we had in common....a sense, an appreciation of the esthetic beauty of what went centuries before us...the history and the greatness of a civilization....now a distant memory yielding ever more questions, than it ever will yield answers.

But the photos were always put away,,back into boxes stuffed into closets....those photos were thrown out at the end of my father's marriage by our mother.....even as a kid I knew my father's dreams and his heart were left behind in the rubble of that old city ...before he had to come home to follow the post-war script of marriage, business career and family.

He found his destination and he turned away from it.....and he wandered damned, lost, bitter, angry and resentful with no real destination, just a pile of obligations that must have suffocated him....and a space inside him full of painful memories of what once was and what might have been yet....
sometimes the bad memories are easier to live with than the good ones...depending on how things in life pan-out,, the good ones can be searing scars that never close-up right.

I always promised myself that I would go to Pompeii and see first-hand what my father saw, I would feel what he had felt...and also own first-hand the things he sold me on as a child...it was a journey I have known I would make someday...known since I was a child sitting with his father sharing a unique understanding and enthusiasm of something great and yet lost.

This past Sunday was Fathers' Day...and I was finally walking through the ruins of old Pompeii, touching the stonework and the wall paintings...walking the streets my father helped unearth when he was barely 23....I saw what my father saw, touched what had touched us both....he did not lie to me about the place...it was everything he had told me about....

...and it was also the graveyard of his youthful dreams, his passion and optimism...where they all had been left behind abandoned so many years before....they had survived the front lines of the Second World War only to die in an unhappy marriage and a mountain of obligations that left him drowning himself in an alcohol-fueled bitterness.

the nicest thing about it all was that I walked away from the ruins this past Fathers day with something I haven't had, or perhaps dug deep enough to find for most of my life...

that being something to love my father for....sharing his lost hopes and dreams from all those years ago

kind of funny what you can find when you go poking around in old ruins.

[The Bacon Junkie]

Damn, RAT...

Ripping my heart out over here...

Just amazing. 

[RAT900]

It was kind of funny Ryan...I didn't even realize it was fathers day until I started getting Happy FD texts from my kids while I was there

then it all kind of walloped me at once...

sometimes a nice story tracks you down and demands to be written

[Rob Hilding]

RAT  I am glad you got something good from the trip - silver lining an all that rot -

My Dad was far from perfect but I still think about him when I am doing something that he would have enjoyed - like riding the bike (he took over my first bike in 1969 Kawi 90) and wish he was here to share it with.

He moved up to an H1 which he let me ride a quite a few times.

I am only a "step-dad" to my wife's four adult kids, so I don't really know the feeling of being a father, but I try to fill the role when called upon.

[The Bacon Junkie]

It was kind of funny Ryan...I didn't even realize it was fathers day until I started getting Happy FD texts from my kids while I was there

then it all kind of walloped me at once...

sometimes a nice story tracks you down and demands to be written

I'm glad it did...

You're way with words is incomparable.

So, it's kinda your fault that I picked up a book for the first time in a long time tonight.



A quote from Marx (Groucho, not Karl) -
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.  Inside a dog, it's too dark to read."   

[TiNi]

Damn, RAT...

Ripping my heart out over here...

Just amazing. 

i can't agree more... glad to read about your experience