On Being a Father:

This turned out to be a father and son week as Kate went off with her friend Elaine and my son Fred came here for a few days. Fred is 56 and lives with his wife and daughter in Madison, Wisconsin. Over the years Fred and I have always managed to spend time together, mostly working on what we like to call projects. This time it was putting up a motion detector light and a wind indicator on the roof and wiring it into the house. Another time is was replacing rotted out window sashes and making repairs to the bulkhead. For me there is something about our working together that recreates the times of his childhood. I love that memory as it brings back the fun of watching him grow.

Fred was a child who just loved to laugh. His much older sister Elizabeth was his tease and clown. She just thought that Fred was a barrel of fun, and so they tickled and laughed at just about everything, including their Papa who they helped to not take himself too seriously.

I picked Fred up at LaGuardia Airport. As this young man comes to greet me with a big hug I wonder, where did that little boy go who used to delight in building models? The child has never completely left him. He tells me that now to keep from going crazy he makes flying models. I am reminded of our Sunday mornings in the Bronx Zoo where I read the Times in the Lion house while Fred went off to visit his many animal friends. Then we would head for home with a usual stop at a Frankforter cart where Fred would ask for a “frank with mustar and onion.” He learned that from carefully listening to the primarily Greek cart owners.

The more time I spend with this young man the more I am impressed with what he has been able to do with his life. He is kept busy between a 16 year old daughter, his job as a music teacher in the Madison Public schools, and the first bass player in the Madison Symphony Orchestra. He tells me repeatedly that now his favorite composer is Johannes Brahms. I remember in his teen years when it was “Jimmy Hendricks, the Grateful Dead or Lead Zeppelin.” Like all other parents with children in those times we worried about the drugs and the sex and the whole counter culture world. And yet those kids stopped that awful Vietnam war and changed this country forever. Yes, it was that same world of civil rights kids who sat in on those Southern lunch counters that made it possible for Obama to become President. Wasn’t that a time, and Fred was a part of it. I betcha you can tell by now that I am very proud of him.

As his father, and I am sure I speak for all fathers, there is a very special kind of pleasure to spend time with a fully grown man who once was just your very own little snot nosed kid. Did you ever expect him to grow up and be a father like yourself? I doubt it, only because there is another part of fatherhood that never wants them to grow up, but to always be that little boy who we were trying to teach how to play handball, baseball, build models or whatever. Here he is now my very own son who is a full grown man. There is a shift from being a parent to just being two men who have a special love for each other. I will be forever thankful for that
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Thanks Kate N.H.W.Y.