Father's Day was uniquely uneventful this year. Going into our second week without a dryer, the King meditated about various and sundry things while hanging out four loads of laundry. "There's something calming about having to hang everything, then wait for it to dry," he confessed later that night, comparing it to construction work and the way he'd get lost in manual labor.
Bunica brought by a delicious soup, thus sparing me the opportunity to start fires in the kitchen.
When we took a sunset stroll, the King found what every 21st century father needs most- something to climb and no good reason to refrain.
So being a father is the weight of the world and the lightness that comes with lifting it high in the hair and hearing it giggle.
It's looking down at the tracks laid by others and wondering if there isn't some heartbreaking limit in the places we can go if we agree to follow them.
It's knowing you can't fix the past but you bear a responsibility for the future.
For what you sow and how you sow it.
It's teaching your son how to love himself outside the emotional and spiritual confines of gender roles and assumptions. Discovering new paths and giving him a sense of self strong enough to sustain the adventures.
It's watching your daughters breakdance on a bridge and not feeling the need to "show" or teach them anything at all- only to watch them and learn from their joy.
It's knowing deep in your veins what Wendell Berry meant when he wrote:
We have ourselves to fear.
We burn the world to live;
Our living blights the leaf.
It's knowing all these things without knowing the sort of simple answers given by ideologies or self-help books. Learning to read the runes scribbled in spray paint. Finding yourself in what you leave behind.
