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I imagine God to be like my father. My father was always the voice of certainty in my life. Certainty in the wisdom, certainty in the path, certainty always in God. For me God is certainty in everything. Certainty that everything is good and everything is God.
By our Heavenly Father and only because of God, only because of God. We're like other couples. We do not get along perfectly; we do not go without arguments and, as I call them, fights, and heartache and pain and hurting each other. But a marriage is three of us.
My son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all.
Dad, I may not be the best, but I come to believe that I got it in me to be somebody in this world. And it's not because I'm so different from you either. It's because I'm the same. I mean, I can be just as hard-headed, and just as tough. I only hope I can be as good a man as you.
He's [Harry S. Truman] just your dad, and you love him. It's only when you grow up, and step back from him, or leave him for your own career and your own home - it's only then that you can measure his greatness and fully appreciate it. Pride reinforces love. My father was a great man.
One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man.
Spread the diaper in the position of the diamond with you at bat. Then fold second base down to home and set the baby on the pitcher's mound. Put first base and third together, bring up home plate and pin the three together. Of course, in case of rain, you gotta call the game and start all over again.
Sir Walter, being strangely surprised and put out of his countenance at so great a table, gives his son a damned blow over the face. His son, as rude as he was, would not strike his father, but strikes over the face the gentleman that sat next to him and said, "Box about: twill come to my father anon."
His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. It was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.
In a normal family, a surprise means presents, cake and a party. For me ? I had no idea. And my family, doing something nice is seen as an attack. When I was nine, I 'attacked' my father with a fathers day gift. A visor organiser for his car, because it was useful. And it rhymed. Visor. Organiser. I was nine.
For thousands of years, father and son have stretched wistful hands across the canyon of time, each eager to help the other to his side, but neither quite able to desert the loyalties of his contemporaries. The relationship is always changing and hence always fragile; nothing endures except the sense of difference.
The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, 'Daddy, I need to ask you something,' he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan.
I remember my daughter Deni coming along, and she was so pure and caring of everybody and everything. And somehow, this little being managed to get around all the obstacles - the gun turrets, the walls, the moats, the sentries - that were wrapped around my heart. My heart at that time needed her. I think it's the best thing going, parenthood.
If you think about it seriously, all the questions about the soul and the immortality of the soul and paradise and hell are at bottom only a way of seeing this very simple fact: that every action of ours is passed on to others according to its value, of good or evil, it passes from father to son, from one generation to the next, in a perpetual movement.
Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament. But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it.
To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he'd removed the iron sliver I thought I'd die from. I can't remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face.
Being Chinese immigrants in the United States, it was important for my parents to maintain ties that went back a long time. They led by example. My dad didn't bring his work pressures home. We were always aware of them and would go as kids to his office and run around. But when he came home, he was able to leave things behind, at least from our perspective, and focus on us.
Far too often, we fathers avoid the subject because it's so awkward. The subject I am referring to is: buying gifts for women. This is an area where many men do not have a clue. Exhibit A was my father, who was a very thoughtful man, but who once gave my mother, on their anniversary, the following token of his love, his commitment, and-yes-his passion for her: an electric blanket.
If your dad is anything like mine, then you have no clue what to buy him for Father's Day. The only Father's Day tradition in my family is the annual conversation he and I have where I say, 'Hey, Dad, what do you want for Father's Day this year?' and he says, 'Nothing.' Then I ask my mom what I should get him and she says, 'He likes sandalwood soap, dangly jewelry and Chanel No. 5 perfume.'
The nicest Father's Day surprise of all for Dad would be if you handed him a box, and he unwrapped it, and there, inside, sitting on a bed of folded tissue, was the pair of his undershorts that somebody threw away six months ago (without asking Dad) because they had reached the stage where they were 3 percent undershorts and 97 percent holes. Dad misses those undershorts. They were his Faithful Undershorts Companion.
I think that my strong determination for justice comes from the very strong, dynamic personality of my father ... I have rarely ever met a person more fearless and courageous than my father ... The thing that I admire most about my dad is his genuine Christian character. He is a man of real integrity, deeply committed to moral and ethical principles. He is conscientious in all of his undertakings ... If I had a problem I could always call Daddy.
I think back to the day I drove Michelle and a newborn Malia home from the hospital nearly 11 years ago - crawling along, miles under the speed limit, feeling the weight of my daughter's future resting in my hands. I think about the pledge I made to her that day: that I would give her what I never had - that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father. I knew that day that my own life wouldn't count for much unless she had every opportunity in hers.