Father | Son

In much of the competition-based television foisted upon us today, there's a fairly common trope. It's a father or mother doing something like artfully cooking a sea slug or trying to get up Mt. Upchuck-a-rama (I may or may not have that name wrong) in record time for the sole purpose of making their child proud of them. Nine times out of ten, as the footage rolls and the overwrought emotional music is cued, it turns out said child is an infant who would not know if his father was climbing Mt. Whatever or if he was the closet door. So it's pretty safe to say being proud of daddy isn't much of an issue yet.

As the stunningly patient and mighty fine SML will tell you, I don't appreciate these scenes. They're trite, maudlin, and spectacularly lazy. It also usually launches me into an unhinged rant on the nature of parent-child relationships and as her nom de guerre suggests, SML has an unending well of patience with me, but she's done with these rants, so we aren't watching a lot of this type of television together and that's probably for the best.

The Great Mullet Debacle of 2014
Not our finest hour. Let's not
talk about it ever again.

These maudlin scenes have been playing in my mind of late as we are preparing for The RM's wedding just 13 days from today. My involvement in this event has been reserved to paying for stuff sans complaint and taste testing tacos and a next-level dessert for the groom's dinner.  I did nominate myself to create a playlist to add to the ambience of that dinner. For those of you unfamiliar with my iTunes library, it is essentially an extended cry for help consisting of more than 1200 songs that have no discernible rhyme or reason, so this playlist is going to be aces! That said, I've found myself in a mawkish well of my own creation thanks to the lyrics of one song that I added to the list, forgetting that it's about a father's love, as opposed to an unsettling love song between an F-Dude and his F150 as the title would suggest. The chorus of the George Strait song "Love Without End, Amen" goes like this:

Let me tell you a secret about a father's love

A secret that my daddy said was just between us

He said daddies don't just love their children every now and then

It's a love without end, amen

It's a love without end, amen

As I've listened to that song multiple times, more than one tear has fallen from my eyes as I think about this good young man, my son, and the pride I have in him, as well as the unending love I feel. Even during the Great Mullet Debacle of 2014 wherein we experienced a taste of the Seventh Ring of Hell that no parent should have to endure, I've loved this son of mine to the Moon and back, just as I have his sisters.

Holding him after 18 months of not seeing each other

My son, The RM, is now somehow on the precipice of marrying a smart, capable, lovely young woman and starting a completely new phase of life. I can't help but marvel at how this has all played out. Wasn't it just yesterday that I held him in my arms for the first time, still smarting from the fact that I didn't get to finish a burrito because he decided to turn up fast? Wasn't it just yesterday that I held both him and his mother as a doctor set his broken arm (first of three, but who's counting)? Wasn't it just yesterday that we threw our arms around each other in a victory hug in the bleachers at Wrigley at our first Cubs game? Wasn't it just over a year ago when we threw our arms around him as he emerged from behind the Curtain of Incompetence (AKA the TSA) at the Hartford Airport as he returned from his missionary service as a mature young man? I held him for a good long time that day, remembering all the times I held him before and then, as you see from the picture above, I stood back and marveled at my son. I marveled at the man he'd become. I marveled at what the future held for him. I marveled that somehow I had something to do with raising him and his sisters into the good people that they are. (On that point, I need to give credit where credit is due right now: the stunningly patient and mighty fine SML is why my children are who they are. Also, she is a saint.)

In the coming days, he and I will have a few more 'advice' sessions and I'm sure he won't remember a lot of it. I hope he'll remember the good things I've tried to demonstrate as his father and as a husband to his mom. In thirteen days, I'll hold him again as I wrap my arms around him and through my tears, of which there will be many, I'll say 'Congratulations, son,' as he embarks on a new life as a husband. I'll give my new daughter-in-law a hug and say 'He's yours now. Buena suerte!'

Like that cowboy philosopher George Strait said of a father's love for his children, "It's a love without end, amen." I could not agree more.

How Many More? A Painful Redux

@abcnews.com

I don't make a habit of republishing old posts here in the Den. I do so with one exception and that is in honor of September 11th. So it's got to be something pretty momentous to get me to republish a post. I think that 58 people slaughtered by a lone terrorist (because that is EXACTLY what he was), carrying a multitude of automatic weapons worthy of an elite army assault team, seems pretty momentous to me.

I published the post below on 3rd October 2015 in response to yet another school shooting that left ten people dead. What gutted me earlier today when I reread the post is that I couldn't even remember where that shooting occurred. That's how common these shootings are and how desensitized we've become to them. Here we are, nearly two years later to the day, living the horror of the worst mass shooting in the United States, for now. There will be another one, a worse one because we will continue to tolerate this madness.

We can bang on all we want about when is the "right time" to talk about gun control. Once this country decided it was super cool with the slaughter of twenty children, some of whom were only a couple of years older than my grandson is today, then the gun control debate was over.

Our leaders will wring their hands, offer up their prayers, tweets and platitudes, and then do absolutely nothing. And soon enough, I'll republish this post, with more editorial comment in italics, with the occurrence of an event with an even higher body count. And nothing will change.

I'm sad. I'm angry. I'll let my legislators know where I stand on this. I will make my voice heard even though I fear that we are going to continue to choose to let these things happen.

3rd October 2015
Another day, another mass shooting here in the United States. Ten dead, including the perpetrator, in another senseless mass shooting at yet another school.

How many more of these incidents will we tolerate? Apparently our tolerance knows no bounds.

Another shooter who fits an all too familiar refrain. Loner, entrenched in the Internet and all that lurks within its infinite, murky well, fascinated by other similar murderous acts. And yet those that know these shooters all say, "I'm shocked." "Never saw it coming."

How many more of these incidents will we tolerate? See above.

Our elected representatives all follow the same script in the wake of this madness. They take to social media and declare their sympathy for the victims and their willingness to pray for those who have been lost. This is their 'action.' Kudos on your hollow actions. Thanks for taking the time to send a tweet. Call me crazy, but I don't see how a Tweet is an act of absolution for your collective cowardice and unwillingness to address this insanity.

How many more of these incidents will we tolerate? See above.

I guess it's easier to fixate on what a former child star turned epic skank is not going to wear when she hosts "Saturday Night Live" tonight than how we can address this madness. See the pregnancies of the Kardashian trollops.

I guess it's easier to play a parlor game of "What Will The Megalomaniac Donald Say Today" than to address the mental health crisis in our country that is a key driver of these killings. I. Can't. Even.

I guess it's easier to ignore the fact that our children are being taught how to survive a mass shooting from their earliest days in elementary school than it is to question why anyone should be allowed to have a full-on weapons depot in their basement.

How many more of these incidents will we tolerate? This is now a rhetorical question.

Given our track record, there seems to be no limit. When will we tire of it? Apparently never. When will we do something to make it stop? We'll see if the next one finally does it.

"This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to happen every few months in America." President Obama