thoughts on Fathers

Reading http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-last-late-show-with-my-father/
got me to thinking about my own father.
I never knew him. He was reportedly older than my mother, and if history is any evidence, quite a gent.

I found two pictures of him, one taken in Skagway when he was quite young, and one taken when grown, that show a bit of a dandy.

He died when I was about 18 months old, and so I never conciously was aware of him.

This is something that has always nibbled away at the back of my mind, and is one of the reasons I've been rather sporatically poking at my geneology. My sister-in-law is rather a genius at it and has been a great help.

In the last few years I've watched my wife lose her father to dimentia, so he's gone but still here. Dosen't know who she is, or any one is other than someone that he likes, maybe.
She's dealt with it very well, and I admire her for it, I'm not sure I would be able to cope as well.

I grew up in a house hold of women. My mother, my great aunt, and my grandmother. My grandfather out lived my grandmother, but for many of my early years he was away in Kenniwick, Wa. working on the Hanford site. When he was home and in my life I remember him as a hugely important person to me, and I loved him very much. It was Grandpa Walter that took me to the Portland Beavers ball games, Walter that took me to the Labor Temple, grandpa that I watched Portland Wrestling with late on Friday nights. Grandpa would sit next to the radio in the front room and listen to the news, and when he got tired of Grandma's talking, he'd take out his hearing aid. She'd go on for a while and after a bit you'd hear from the kitchen..."Walter! did you turn off you hearing aid?" always good for a snicker.

But it was mostly from grandpa I learned what being a good man was supposed to mean, that and radio. T.V. didn't come into my life till late.

When I was about seven Mom met and later married the man I would always think of as my father, even though I knew he was my "Step" father.
Herb was a very good man. A good provider, a good listener, even if you didn't know it, and he loved my Mother very much. He died a few years ago, and I miss him.
I learned how to be a father from him.

I don't know if I was a good father to my daughters, I've always suspected not, but I wasn't able to do much more than I did, I don't expect to ever know for sure, but then I also suspect we all fail as parents, and it's just dumb luck if we get anything right.

How do we prepare our children for the world? I'm damned if I know, but if we can teach resilliance, an ability to really see what is in front of us, and the tools to ferrett out Truth in most situations I hope that's enough.
Curiosity(that's not spelled right, but get over it) is natural and so don't kill it.
How to be a caring self-sufficent human being.
Not just how to be a good man, but a good HUman.

Somewhere, in the darkening theater of my memory
I know
I have Loved
I know I have loved
And have been loved...

But when, who, why
slips through the fingers of my memory
evaporating mist...

Some time I held
Some one close
Felt another heart beating...
Felt another breath upon my cheek

But when, who, why...

Not even a fading memory....

More the illusion of a memory...

Some times self-awareness is a bitch.
I've often said that I have too much time to think, when I was driving a bus, sitting doing essentially nothing(that includes fiddling around on the 'puter), or waiting for something or another.
Contemplating the state of our political debate, or lack thereof, I find myself decrying the reprehensible vituperation of one side against the other, and please note I'm calling out everybody, and I realize that I'm as guilty of it as the next person.
Damn and Blast!
How is it right for me to rail against Mr. Limbaugh's slanders when I do it myself?
The answer is that it isn't. If I wish to be taken for someone who wishes rational discussion, I have to engage in rational discussion, and not vituperate against others no matter how good it feels at the moment, and let's be quite honest here, it does feel good to call some slime ball in the most rancourious(you're going to find quite a number of miss-spellings here, get over it)of terms.
And that's possibly the reason for it.
"If it feels good, do it"
Statement of an age, and possibly one of the worst ideas ever to take over a generation.
So I guess I've got to up my game and watch myself. I don't wanna grow up, I wanna call out the slime balls of the world in the worst way possible, and in the worst language possible.
But the down side to that is that I don't look any better that the slime balls, not that I care much about how I look, but I do want my opinions to carry some weight, and so I will contemplate my short commings, and attempt to improve my image.
Crap.

First and formost I'd like to put forward a disclaimer.
I'm a "yellow dog Democrat", and for those that aren't familiar with the term, it generally means that I'd vote for a yellow dog rather than vote for a Republican.
That being said let me also state that I'm an Oregonian, which means I'll vote for whom ever I please irreguardless of party.
So by now you've guessed I'm political, and that I'm going to talk about politics, fair warning...I am and I will.
This political round I'm irritated, conflicted, and dismayed. I don't understand what the GOP is attempting.
I know that having a even a marginally African-American in the White House is incrediablly offensive to a large element of my fellow citizens, though I can't fathom why. Oh, I know all the explanations for the dislike, but I can't truely believe that anyone would think it mattered. And I kow that a large number of the GOP hardliners are wide-eyed fanatics on the matter of shrinking the size and scope of government, but I can't help but think that it's because they don't understand what the role of government is.
Now, admittedly, my understanding of the role of government is personal and biased, but in any case it goes something like this:
The purpose of government is to benefit the majority of the population.It's not going to do a perfect job and some one is going to be less happy about that than others, but that's how it goes. Along the way government needs to protect the vulnerable, and provide rules for how we get along that are acceptable to the majority of the populace.
That's sort of my basic understanding of how it's SUPPOSED to work.
I'ts not doing that, and hasen't for some time now, and although, some folks are trying to repair it, there are quite a few that are endevoring to stop them and turn the system into a vehicle of personal enrichment.
Now along the way the american Taliban has hijacked part of the GOP and is attempting to insert it's self into the political process, which, historically, has been the death knell of any sane cause. True Believers are always a detriment to any rational discussion, for while they're fun to play with they don't add anything to the debate. Social, legal and political changes need to be debated in an open forum, and True Believers don't debate, they preach, for either side, but no debate, and if there's one thing that we need at this time, it's an open debate.
I think even the True Believers have been high-jacked. Undermined by secular interests that want to use the so-called "Tea Party" for their own purposes to twist government to benifit only themselves, and I'm not just refering to the Koch Bro.s.

In my understanding of "How Government is Supposed to Work", let me state right away that Government isn't a bussiness. A bussiness is supposed to produce a prodect or service, and at the end of the day a profit. If it benifits the people employed by the business, all the better, but that's not it's puropse.
Government, on the other hand, produces as out come, a benifit to the society as a whole, no bottom line, no profit, no body getting out of it more than they put in.
Idealy government benifits the whole society equally, but that's ideal and not reality, I know.
Government protects the society from outsiders, and each other. It helps those that can't fend for themselves, and provides mechanisims to care for those parts of society that can't manage even day to day things.
Is that Socialism? Yes, it's also enshrined in our social contract with each other through every ethos and religious contract we have ever develouped. Government is just the way the United States has chosen to do it, and I believe in it.
In the best of times a government should run a zero sum balance sheet, but that's not always possible. So we have deficits, and right now we need to run huge deficits, due to past foolish spending and current need. It's not the worst thing in the world, and it won't mean the end of the world as we knew it. What it brings to the forefront of our collective realization is that we are all interconnected, you, me, the whole world. And at certian times that realization is more pressing than at others.

A short thought this time.
while listening to a PBS (of course you knew I would be the kind of person the would do that), conversation with S. James Gates, I was reminded of so many things.
Of the love of SiFi that was given to my by my mother, desperate to ween me from the comic books of the day. She encouraged me to read books, novels any damn thing that wasn't a comic book, and I did. I was a plyable little fart, easily lead to water. She offered the literary world and I plunged in right up to my ankles. Heinlein, Azimov, DelRey, the list is not quite endless, but you couldn't prove that by me. I read any thing that could be called SiFi, and a scattering of things that wern't, not enough to matter.
Why did a conversation on a PBS program encite this? well, S. James Gates is a leading proponant of String Theory, and I love String Theory.
As a child, dealing with his mother's death by cancer around the age of nine, his age, not his mother's, he burried his hurt in SiFi and it lead to a life long study of Physics.
Now, I'm not a scientist, don't make any claim in that direction. Hell, the only scientific class I took in high school was some mish-mash of anything that could be labled "science" all in one easily digestable grey lump for those of us that were totally useless in the scientific realm, and I was painfully terminally bored the whole time. Where I had fun was in my math classes, where one year just out of cantankerousness I proved that, mathmatically, the interior dimensions of a sphere were infinite, and that was my last hurrah.
What grabbed my attention with Mr. Gates was the string theory.
The first time I heard of string theory I felt a resonance of truth. It made sense to me in a fundimental way that no other idea has ever done.
Srings of vibrating energy all in an infinite variety of "tones" that make up all matter.
There are those amoung us that have always been different, they see things, hear things. Could some of them be right?
Composers especially have the ability to create amazing, astounding, glorious pieces of music that transport the soul to places of beauty. Could some ot them have the ability to hear the "music" of the Universe?
Hildegard von Bingen, may well have been one. She is thought to have had "visions" as early a age 3, and these visions were with her through out her life.

Some how the idea of string theory and the Music of the Spheres are compatible notions.

more to come............

Why does this blog exist?
Why does any blog exist? hopefully to promote better understanding, or, at least, better understanding of an individual point of view. And I suppose that one publishes a blog to offer a point of view that a person might feel is given short shrift in general.
WhyEverKnot came into being in the late 60's, when 1). it was a catch phrase of a group of us that hung around together at PSU(Portland State Uni.), and 2). when I began netting, as in fish nets, to make hand bags, and carry bags, to sell. The economic enterprise never amounted to much, but the name hung on.

I'm an actor. I have been most of my life. Not famous, not well known, just a hard working regional character actor, with grand ambitions and limited future. I don't generally have delusions of grandure, I do dream, but reality is a harsh bleary eyed morning, with cold floors and stale coffee.

I've spent the last 24 years as a medium sized city Transit Operator. Getting up at gawd-offal hours of the morning, to ferry people from where they may have wanted to be to where they didn't want to go, and back again. During that time I've seen a fair amount of the Human Comedy, and lived through some of my own. I won't abuse you with my personal story, it's not that interesting, and there's better on T.V..

I feel deeply, as do you, about many things.
I think people need to be nicer to each other, and to themselves. There is so much pain in this world, there should be good reasons not to add to it, come up with your own, I know I have mine.

From time to time I hope to add to this monologue, and possibly elicit a response or two, but I think this is going to be a rather solitary expidition into the future.