Sunday Scribblings

The Sunday Scribble this week is to examine and interpret the following anyway we wish.

"I don't want to be a passenger in my own life." (Diane Ackerman).

I had a vision of an airplane flying over a beautiful tundra,(it looks like Africa), and a woman (me), dressed in safari clothes, especially that cool hat, doing battle over the steering controls!

The metaphor is engaging and interesting, but I can not get the image of me flying a plane into the side of the Cameroon Mountains out of my head.

So I segue to Shakespeare:

This above all: to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day; Thou canst not then be false to any man.

And then I segue to my Dad, who I wanted to write about anyway.

Today Joe and I travel home to Kentucky to attend two monumental birthdays. The first, our grandchild Tinkerbelle is celebrating her first birthday and the second, my Dad is celebrating his 87th.

Every Fathers Day, every Christmas, every birthday we celebrate with Dad I wonder if this is the final one we will spend together as a family intact. My mother loves to retell my fathers recurring dream, for he no longer can articulate the memory, that at the age of 90 he will pass away in the back of a church, and my brother N. will find him and bring him home.

Each of us six siblings has an exclusive kinship with our father.

As I grow older and allow myself to understand it, I realize that he passed on to us the desire and drive to follow our hearts, excel without apologies, and always strive to be better than we presume ourselves to be.

"You're a "OUR-FAMILYS-SURNAME"!" He'd tell us with his finger in our face and fire in his startling blue eyes.

I miss my Dad. He is locked in a high tower of dementia, his memories sadly ripped from him. Sadly for all of us.

I dream of him at times. He is always at the prime of life. That is the way I want to always remember him.

And to never forget what he tried to instill in each of us when he taught, To Thine Own Self Be True.