Still giving life to his father

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Still giving life to his father

Robert sits on a chair next to his father's bed. He holds his father's hand and talks to him just to talk. He tells him about the day's news, about a weekend they spent in Maine, about all the people who have come to the hospital to visit. When an aide arrives to take his father's temperature with a thermometer she has to put in his ear, Robert explains the procedures. His father motions and Robert understands. "You want some water?" he asks. The older man nods and Robert adjusts the bed and holds his father and puts a cup to his lips and says, "It's coming," as he tilts the cup so that just a tiny bit of liquid drips into his father's mouth. More than a little will make him choke and cough and struggle for breath. And he is struggling hard enough as it is.

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A dad writes what is unsaid

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A dad writes what is unsaid

He writes things that he would never say in person. Not that they're intimate things. They're not. They're brief statements that come right to the point.

But his written words are different from his spoken ones. He writes from a place he seems to go to only in print, a room he has kept under lock and key for so long that it's only with pen in hand or with a keyboard in front of him that he can enter.

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A father's ordinary kindnesses make extraordinary impression

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You want something out of the ordinary for a Father's Day story.

You want a tale of tenacity: Jamie Fiske's father fighting for a liver transplant for his small daughter. Or a tale of courage: Ricky Hoyt's father repeatedly achieving, with his physically challenged son, seemingly impossible goals. Or a gripping melodrama: a soldier clinging to a picture of a child he has never seen, enduring great hardships, surviving deadly battles, fed by the need to go home and embrace his son.

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Faith sustains those Lacey left behind

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I expected him to be angry, furious, out of control. I expected him to be screaming and yelling "Why."

I should have known better. I have never seen him angry. Wounded, puzzled, defeated, yes. But I have never seen hate in his eyes.

Not the first time I met him, shortly after his daughter's death, when I drove to his house and sat on his couch and looked through albums filled with photos of a beautiful, smiling little girl.

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A warped society believes Woody's selfishness is OK

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So now all of a sudden it's Mia who's the bad guy, Mia who has all the problems, Mia who's to blame for the Woody/Mia/Soon-Yi triangle.

This seems to be the latest theory. Why would anynormal woman adopt so many children? Why would any normal woman adopt children with handicaps? Mia Farrow cannot possibly be drawn to these chilren. She cannot possibly enjoy her huge brood. It has to be an act.

Therefore she cannot be what she appears to be.

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Looks can deceive when you search for family values

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He is wise, respected, serious and well-known. People around the world depend upon him to tell them what they think. Few would dispute his intelligence.

I see him when he is on vacation. He is on a cruise ship for seven days with two children. They are his children, I learn. Perhaps he has shared custody. Perhaps he has them every other weekend and for vacations each year. I don't know.

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Here's a dad who sets the standard for sharing, caring

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Ah, yes, the good old days. Dad worked 10, 12, 14 hours, came home, sat down, read the paper, ate dinner, took out the rubbish, shoveled snow in the winter, cut the grass in the summer, and gave the final word in all important decisions.

Your father will be home in 10 minutes. I want you to put your books away, now.

You better watch your step, young man. Don't let your father catch you talking like that.

How different things are now. The monarchy is dead. Democracy rules. Father is no longer a figurehead. Fathers father.

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Childhood joy: It can't last

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There's this little girl, just 13 months old. Her birthday was Valentine's Day, her father tells the woman next to him. She is toddling around the doctor's waiting room totally unconcerned that everyone else is sitting. She races to the TV, stares at it for a minute, then turns away. She picks up a book she finds on a chair, looks at it, then puts it down. She approaches a stranger, meets the stranger's eyes, grins, then runs back to her father who hasn't for a second taken his eyes off her.

She is a tiny thing, a baby, still bald, the blond fuzz on her head barely visible. She wears pink pants and a teal green sweater and a grin that shows off her teeth. Her mother is in the doctor's office because within weeks she will be having another baby. But it's clear the father is totally enthralled with this one.

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War's trauma remembered

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I wasn't there. I hadn't been born. I don't remember.

And yet I do have memories pieced from stories I was told and stories overheard, and television and movies and books. A photograph of a uniformed boy hung on a parlor wall, but the memory is fuzzy, the boy's face unclear. Army? Navy? Air Force? In which did he serve? I don't know. I was five, maybe six. I don't remember the boy's name; I couldn't pick him out of a crowd. But I know he was a boy, not a man.

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Promises are just words, and court orders mean zip

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She called last week, upset, frustrated, furious. Her husband walked out on her 12 years ago leaving her with four children, 10, 9, 6 and 5. He still loved her, he told her then. He was just tired of being married. "But don't worry," he said. "They're my children and I intend to provide for them. Don't you think for a minute that I'm deserting you." Yet that's exactly what he did.

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