Happy Birthday, Dad!

Today, my father celebrates 74 years of living on this planet. So, in honor of him, I dedicate this blog entry to my father and the lessons he taught me.

Dad, thanks for everything. Of course, some parts of who I am I cannot attribute to you but without your genetic material, I would not be.

You bought me my first plastic model kit, a U.S. battleship, when I was six years old. I sat with you at the dining area of the great room and glued the pieces together while my sister sat with my mother and watched "The Wizard of Oz" on television in the den area of the great room, training my sister and me in the gender-specific roles of your upbringing. You probably built most if not all of the outdoor playsets I enjoyed, including the slides, swings, jungle gyms and other metal contraptions that could be called art if displayed in a modern metropolitan museum. We just thought of these things as utilitarian, didn't we, mon pere?

From you I learned to appreciate the taste of beer and cigars, the thrill of stock car racing and the necessity for team sports (mainly, to keep aggressive young people focused on bullying each other).

You also told me about my heritage, the Scots-Irish immigrants who came to North America and helped build a new nation out of the scattered settlements of the British, Spanish and French Colonies. With you I traveled the backwaters of the East Coast, reliving the fights on the battlefields like King's Mountain and the starvation of settlers who stepped foot on Roanoke Island and the shores of Jamestown. I imagined what our ancestors might have seen as their imported diseases and fighting machines wiped out whole populations of the indigenous North American people -- huge tracts of land free for the taking. I understood that the men of my past felt that, after winning the Revolutionary War, they deserved the right to buy and sell other men and women to work the land given to them by the new government of the United States of America. Later, I would learn the irony of history after you told me that you had grown up on land sold to your family by a freedman.

Such is the heritage you have given me, teaching me that skin color does not tell you much about another person and genetics only partially determines your fate.

So now, enjoy your retirement, living as a "snowbird" in the subtropical home you inherited from your mother, and look with pride at the society that you and our ancestors helped create. To be sure, the economic situation appears rather bleak. Crime is on the rise in some parts of the country. But as you taught me, we look at the present moment of our lives through the wrong end of a telescope or microscope, turning minutiae into catastrophes (or did you say militia?) and the other way around. Nothing is permanent. What is down will be up before we know it.

I still take what you say to heart. Indeed, nothing is permanent. As you have noted, the glory days of the Scot-Irish, German and English people may well be on the wane. Now, a man with Irish and African heritage serves as President. His opponent in the next election may well be of Indian descent. In the case of either one of them, their ancestors lived in different parts of the world than ours, celebrated different cultures, rights, rituals, and moral values than the ones imposed on us by Puritanical and Calvinistic forebears of ours. But hey, guess what -- they're still humans, too. Aliens have not taken over the world just yet (with jokes from movies like "MIB" that you haven't seen not withstanding).

The Hollywood cowboy heroes of your youth are gone. The cowboys of my generation wear rhinestone, ride mechanical bulls and die of lung cancer (a few of them turned into sheep herders and...well, never mind...neither one of us saw that movie!). The cowboys of the next generation may eat curry and ride off into the Bollywood sunset on elephants.

Life is still worth living. The beaches are still worth seeing (just don't step out into the untreated water). Your friends still like you. There's still many a sunset to watch and book to read. The Internet will continue to expand, giving you all sorts of new email jokes to exchange with colleagues and websites on which to look up your old Army and school buddies.

Best of all, your children and grandchildren still need you! So, keep your head up high and laugh, even when your family is all talking at once and miss something you say. Be happy that you have a family to celebrate holidays and birthdays with you (sadly, many people in this world do not).

You have given this world a corporate, academic and genetic heritage you can be proud of, including a son who writes not-so-serious quips that still drive you up a wall! That's why I'm posting this on a blog you won't read instead of in a nice birthday card that you will (guess that "fear of God" thing you put in me still lingers in my mind; to disappoint your father is to disappoint The Father, according to your Baptist/Presbyterian elders).


Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, mein Vater!