Canter Bridge

Sorrow flows up and down the generations like greased lighting.

One begets a dullard to one’s own grief; The father of a villain has no joy. (Proverbs 17:21 JPS)

By contrast, paternal admiration and filial delight move at a slower pace. They grow incrementally, are nourished by passing showers rather than drowned by monsoons, they linger and satisfy like a slow-moving front of cool air that trundles in imperceptibly yet refreshes.

On this Father’s Day, it is easy for this father to linger in range of the proverb’s echo and consider what might have been. I do so with gratitude, for these dire things have not been my lot.

My two sons’ voices come over the line with the growing assuredness of young men who are finding their way. The voices of their respective wives, the going-on-two squeals of a grandson, these are the sonic background of shared life that has found form and planted itself in good soil.

Grief and villainy belong to another place, another time, and—in this moment—other families. One says so with empathy, not Schadenfreude.

Their pain does not go unchronicled. The curator of biblical wisdom knows that fathers and mothers suffer with their children. The knife of a child’s folly finds flesh easily, his traumatized parents always vulnerable to the latest calamity, the boundary between love and principle ever elusive.

The family honor is embarrassingly stained by those stupidities that find their way out into the community’s eye. Yet mother and father live with so many more that have never gone public, the quiet corrosive destruction of a family’s imagined future by villainies they never dreamed their own flesh and blood could perpetrate.

How different on this Father’s Day afternoon to recall those voices over the phone, those words from sons who live too far away but do not wander or at least do not wander without aim.

May they continue to find their way home, soon and safely, bringing their families with them.

May this happy Father’s Day be one of many, strung like beads on the thin string of my life, until no-longer-young sons carry their contented old man’s body to its rest.