Father's Day Special

I've had an interesting life, and it's still interesting, but one thing I couldn't help but notice is that when I stop and look around and count those who are with me on this journey, I see exactly one parent. My mother is still alive, but she's nowhere around. She let me know years ago that she was finished with me. Now that I'm grown and her obligations are complete, she doesn't have any more use for me except when she needs to borrow money.

But my father is still around. He's been there during the toughest times in my life. He was there when I needed someone to hug, and in every baby picture I've seen of myself, if I'm being held, it's him holding me (or his father, in one picture).

My father has passed on to me most of the wisdom that has gotten me this far. When I have good news, I want to tell him, and when I'm down he helps me find the path leading up. When my days are dark, he shows me the sunshine, and when I'm cold he reminds me to come back to Houston.

At times when my mother was railing against me for refusing to become a nice little neonazi conformist like her, my father was telling me he was proud I found my own path. When my mother told me that I was hopeless and not worth holding onto, my father showed me what I was doing wrong, or what I was doing right.

And in the end, when I was feeling the worst, when every moment I felt like crying and didn't know why, when I felt loneliness such as I never imagined, and my mother's only advice was to pick up a Bible and stop feeling sorry for myself, my father held me close until I stopped crying, and it turned out that was all I really needed in the end.

And so, to my father... I didn't create this, but it sums up my feelings nicely, I think.