{"id":5427,"date":"2025-06-15T14:01:07","date_gmt":"2025-06-15T21:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5427"},"modified":"2025-06-15T14:32:45","modified_gmt":"2025-06-15T21:32:45","slug":"a-fathers-day-flashback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5427","title":{"rendered":"A Father’s Day Flashback"},"content":{"rendered":"

Father\u2019s day. I\u2019ve posted a lot about my father here down the years, but I\u2019m not sure I ever did better than my post for Veterans Day, November 11, 2015. Today\u2019s schedule is a little tight, so what I want to do is post that entry again in its entirety. I\u2019m also posting a very old photo of my father and his two kids, taken Christmas 1957. I was 5; Gretchen was 13 months. I have few good photos of my dad while I was growing up because my mother knew nothing about photography and didn\u2019t like fooling with his expensive twin-lens reflex. So maybe this was taken with another camera. I simply don\u2019t know. I scanned the snapshot print and here it is. He taught me a lot before he was struck with severe oral cancer in 1968, two months after my 16th birthday. He might have taught me more had he remained healthy longer, but what he did<\/em> teach me\u2026hey, read about it below. The Kleenex box on my desk here is empty, and I need to run to the pantry and fetch another.<\/p>\n

\"fatherkidstrains1957\"<\/a><\/p>\n

November 11, 2015: Kick Ass; Just Don\u2019t Miss<\/h3>\n
\n

Veterans Day. I haven\u2019t posted much lately. Hey, how many more times do you want to hear \u201cI threw another metric shitload of stuff into boxes\u201d? That\u2019s been my life, more or less, for several weeks.<\/p>\n

Well, today, I was packing books and other things in my office into boxes (yet again) and happened upon the little box of things that came to me from my father: his gas company tie tack, a Lane Tech prom favor, his Holy Name Society lapel pin, one of my grandfather\u2019s medals from WWI, his WWII service medal, his Ruptured Duck, his corporal\u2019s stripes, and finally\u2013by then I had to reach for a Kleenex\u2013his WWII dog tags.<\/p>\n

My father signed up for the Army the day after Pearl Harbor. He was 19. He wanted to be in the infantry, but he had a crooked leg and a limp and didn\u2019t qualify. The Army told him to finish his freshman year of college at Northwestern, and told him there\u2019d be a spot at radio operator school waiting for him in June. There was some grumbling, especially since he hated<\/em> the accounting curriculum his father had browbeaten him into taking at Northwestern, but so it was. That June he went to Scott Field in southern Illinois, and became one helluva radio operator. He was in the AACS (Army Airways Communication Systems) and could copy Morse in his head at 30+ WPM and hammer it out on a beat-up Olivetti mill all night long. He had a job and threw himself into it with everything he had\u2013that was his way\u2013but what he really wanted to do was shoot Germans.<\/p>\n

This always puzzled me, and it had nothing to do with my ancestry\u2013or his. It took me decades to figure it out, and I had to dig for clues in a lot of odd places. He told a lot of stories, and I heard a few more from my mother and Aunt Kathleen, his sister. Once I was in my forties and had put a little distance between myself and my father\u2019s long, agonizing death, I could deal with the troubling reality: My father was a wiseass, a snot, a fighter, a dare-taker. He was suspended several times from high school for fighting (and once beat the crap out of a much taller kid after the kid had stabbed him in the stomach in wood shop) and took a fifth year to finish. Limp or no limp, he had at age 45 broken up a fight in Edison Park single-handed, while my little sister watched in astonishment. He was literally throwing teenaged boys in every direction until they quit beating on a smaller boy at the bottom of the pile. Limp or no limp, he dove into deep water once and hauled a drowning man back to shore under one arm. (He was all muscle, and swam like a shark.) I used to think of him as brave, but no: He was fearless<\/em>, and that is not the same thing.<\/p>\n

To be brave is to do what you know you have to do in spite of your fear. To be fearless is to just wade in and kick ass, damn the consequences. There were consequences, like six stitches in his stomach and being held back a year in school. I hate to think what might have happened if he had<\/em> made the infantry. I might have ended up being some other man\u2019s son.<\/p>\n

He knew this, of course, and as I grew into my teens I think he was trying to guide me away from fearlessness and toward bravery, not that I had ever shown the least measure of fearlessness. (One of his weirdest failings as a parent was this unshakable assumption that I would grow up to be exactly like him.) He had a saying for it: \u201cKick ass. Just don\u2019t miss.\u201d The lesson was not to let fear paralyze you, but instead let it calibrate<\/em> you. Fear can turn down the volume on your enthusiasm and force you to take stock of your resources and your limitations. I got that, and have done as well as I have by balancing enthusiasm with discernment. Only one other piece of advice from my father (\u201cIf you\u2019re lucky and smart you\u2019ll marry your best friend\u201d) has ever served me better.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve mentioned here a number of times, our Colorado house is positioned on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain such that we can hear the bugle calls (and cannon!) from Fort Carson, two miles downslope. We hear taps most nights, and I realize (now that most of the house is at last in boxes) that I won\u2019t be hearing it a great many more times, and almost certainly not again on Veterans\u2019 Day. Tonight I will go out on the deck again and salute both the brave and the fearless, my father and countless others who have kicked ass in the service of their countries. Some missed, many didn\u2019t, and the lucky ones came home to tell their stories and raise their (sometimes peculiar) sons.<\/p>\n

I am by no means fearless, and I sincerely hope that I never have to be truly brave. However, if I ever have to kick ass, I will. And thanks to a man who knew the difference between bravery and fearlessness, when that time comes, I will not miss<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Father\u2019s day. I\u2019ve posted a lot about my father here down the years, but I\u2019m not sure I ever did better than my post for Veterans Day, November 11, 2015. Today\u2019s schedule is a little tight, so what I want to do is post that entry again in its entirety. I\u2019m also posting a very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5427"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5432,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5427\/revisions\/5432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}