Conspire, Aspire, Inspire, Perspire, Church Spire.

I was at  keyboard of my PC, struggling to squeeze out my secrets, the keys inside that unlocked  my thoughts of loyalty, kindness, affection, courage, justice and the routes of those highways to contentment and comfort, triumph and distinction, reward and reward recognition. Why is it such a struggle to know or think we know, the truth about ourselves and of those we know and once knew. My neighbor, Kent, across the street, has just pushed open the front door, calling out if anyone was at home. I sighed, wondering if I would ever put words on paper, to start, to travel, to finish.

Kent,  was returning a tape rule, borrowed well before Christmas, or was it Thanksgiving. We are the kind of neighbors that do not keep track of our borrowings and lendings.

"What are you writing about this time?" he said.

This time? This was 2012, and on my computer screen was an article I started in the bright summer days of 2001. I was still at it, but I did not tell him that. I prefer my friends and neighbors to think that I sit down every day, full of inspiration and exaltation, streaming the words out across the page, perfection itself, with no need of spellchecking, thesaurus or grammar check.

"Give me a subject. . ."  I would challenge them at dinner parties,    ",. . .and I will have an essay on it by the morning."  Fortunately for me, few followed up.

People ask me what I write about, the subjects, those arenas  of play and performance that the world displays with us as participants and actors reading the lines and coming to center stage.  I want to sound grand and intellectual, positive and tell them that I write about truth and justice; peace and harmony, and honor and morality.  I always want to say that I produce easy essays on life, love and liberty, but more often end up telling them that my last essay was on utility poles, or the history of string, 

What I did not tell Kent, was that I had been thinking of my father, causing,  just before he entered, some very wet eyes. I had been listening to Judy Collins sing one of her songs; My Father. In it, she sings of her father's promise, to take them to France and sail on the Seine. Fathers are like that; hopelessly romantic, starry-eyed, and promise their children the world.

        The cruelest remark I ever heard about somebody's father was, in answer to "What did your father do?" the reply "He failed."  I don't know if my father failed at anything, because I never knew his dreams or longings. I do know that he cared for us, put food on the table, came home every night, and sighed very heavily and glared around the dinner table if we made a noise during the nightly radio newscast, or the soccer scores every Saturday night.. Not once did he promise to take us to France.

Ms. Collins sings of her father's promises and dreams for his daughters; of his intents if not his consummation and completion of them. What, I wonder, were my fathers intents? Did he intend that his sons and daughter go to college?   Was it in his list of goals to have us becomes highly successful men, important in the community, admired by friend and foe alike?   Was, instead, his designs for his children a little more simple; be kind to others, think before you act, read, understand, love?

Thirty years after he passed, I still miss my father very much. Not his physical presence, but those moments that I never had; to talk with him, tell him of my own hopes and dreams for my children and what I had done with and in my life. I do not seek my father through medium and manipulation, but through those qualities that have been more dream than reality in the time since my father passed away. Dreams become realities when you stop the dreaming and start to establish those once dreamlike qualities as building blocks and anchors in your life to building your own dreams for your children.

Knowing the pitfalls and traps of my own relationship with my father, I can, hopefully,better guide and govern my own children's journey to adulthood of success and the accomplishment of their own dreams --  and realities. As my teenage daughter keeps reminding me, "Dad, it's a different world than when you were my age."  She does not want to hear me say that from age to age, there are qualities and values that are both needed and necessary people of all ages; qualities of good friendship, selflessness, generosity, sacrifice for the common good, mercy, faith hope and charity. Parents are nearly always neophytes in their children's world, and it behooves any parent to learn how to survive in it. Trying to know what my father's world was, and how he survived it, helps me understand my children's hopes and dreams, and my own. Perhaps, just perhaps, there is no such thing as perfection in this world, but I know there are those, for I have met them -- those who always know there is always something else that can be done to improve things. The people, of which I believe my father was one, who aver that they may never make anything or anyone, perfect, but the solutions are for the moment optimum, not perfect.

There was no college cash, no social or politician nepotism, no club tie communication for me from my father. But there was a watchfulness that, what his son did have, would be protected, defended and left unstirred, un-interfered with,  for that son to take with him in his own world to exercise and establish.

I would hope that my four children would, in time, look back and feel as positive about me as I do about my father, despite his "failures" and his heavy dining room sighs. I, like my father, and as Ms. Collins sang, "work on his dreams like boats we knew we would sail in time."

©  Roy Barnacle 2012  All Rights Reserved