Hey, Dad – you’ve been outta here for 60 years; yet, you still are in my mind whenever the rough questions come around.

When I was a stick of a kid, you taught me about the unforgiving world, about courage, and Manhood, and the stuff that goes along with that – requirements I still doubt I can uphold, but in my limited capacity, acknowledge and say, Thanks!

In the eighty-four years of my life there have been five wars: WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. If we count the Cold War, then there have been six though I hesitate to count it since it was the one I was in, and no shots were fired in combat.

At 85, they do not suddenly appear from nowhere. They are already there, reforming and redefining the shapes of things, allowing new experiences of seeing and being seen.

The people I wish to talk to this holiday season

Have had their lines disconnected

permanently

Who Will Still Love Me When I'm 84?

I do not have to hope you will be well in the freezing-time of Idaho, knowing you know more about the weather than the weather knows itself.

Splitting wood a while ago, I relearned a lesson I thought I had learned, learning that a lesson yet unlearned is a lesson yet to be learned. I learned that the lesson yet to be learned was the lesson to be taught, and there was no other teacher but me.

If people do not pay the Piper to play, there will be no Piper, for there will be no People to pay.

The bird soaring over the sea teaches us that to soar is to fly not away but above the strident voices of desperate Fools encouraging us to plunge into oblivion.

The lizard is motionless, now, exhibiting the patience of lizards that only lizards know, and if we were lizards, would we have their capacity?

Autobiographies are surface chronologies.  The true autobiography is an invisible trail wherein events occurring in outer time and space are perceived as epiphanies that form the walker.

When I was 14, My Dad was 61. He took me fishing. We didn’t catch any. Where we are now and where we were then some time ago, fishing was about more than just catching fish. “I love you,” My Dad said. Nothin fishy about that.

“Standing ankle-deep in squishy creek-bottom mud, and belly-button deep in the ice-cold water, you fitted a worm to a hook, flipped the line overhead so that it dropped the bait gently into the water, just as if it’d fell straight from fish-heaven like a special-delicious breakfast would ifn’ it could.”

In 1905, My Dad was 14 when people had stuff they put their hands on and did stuff with way back then before cell phones and computers.

Fish stories are usually about the big one that got away. This fish story is about one that didn’t, but being told by My Dad, it’s as long as the one that did.

When I walk the trails I walked with my father 76 years ago, I am once again who I was.

Maybe it’s time to play musical chairs. Maybe it’s time to move around a bit, to listen to what has already been heard and to say what has already been said, to say what has yet to be said and listen to what has yet to be heard.

I didn’t kiss her until she kissed me; then, I kissed Sally Johnson’s kiss with the kiss that was all the kisses of my life I had ever yearned and dreamed to kiss.