WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Raising Men by John Fleming
byVanderleunonJune 4, 2022
Where are the fathers of all these broken young men? Young men who are raised and schooled by women, preyed upon by proggro shrinks, and have no examples and no discipline in how to be a man. Bereft, their only recourse to become the hard man they yearn to be is to shoot up a school. Where are the scumbag fathers of these broken young men, and why are they not taken to account? Have the scumbag mothers and courts chased them away and out of their sons’ lives? As fathers, we have abandoned our sons to our enemies.
In principle, I do not have a problem with waiting till 21 for semi-auto rifles for young men. We don’t allow 18-year-olds to drink massive quantities of alcohol, it’s just too risky no matter what the laws against drunk driving. I can envision a system where a young man desiring a semi-auto firearm must be vouched for by a responsible adult: a father, a militia leader, a high-school shooting team coach, a gun-club officer, or the local organization that runs 3-gun competitions. In the army, the sergeants identify the Corporal Uphams and shunt them away from the combat arms and into the typewriter brigades. It’s not perfect though, cf. Oswald.
Congress, through its militia definition job, could define the training regimen that all young men and women should undergo to be considered a member of the “regulated” militia, and washouts and f-ups from that would find that they are unable to purchase semi-auto firearms because no militia sergeant would vouch for them, and might even enter a “disapproved for purchase” until such time as the young man straightens up and gets his mind right.
This can never happen. The proggros (hack, spit, filthy scum), will always pervert such laws to establish the principle of pre-emptive denial and confiscation of firearms to/from law-abiding citizens. And the so-called GOPes and “conservatives” will enthusiastically provide cover for these perversions, for they agree totally with the proggros.
So such laws should never be made, and such powers should never be granted to our governments.
It is then, up to us men. We must find a reawakening, a recognition of and commitment to our solemn and eternal duty to raise our sons right and see to it that they do not fall into perdition. We must wrest our sons away from the misguided at best and evil at worst clutches of women, teachers, perverts, pedos, psychologists, psychiatrists with their filthy drugs, the entire ecosystem of proggro leeches that prey upon our children.
(Oh, would that I had a smidgen of Mel Brooks talent and could come up with the equivalent of Hedley Lamar’s recitation of all the villains, i.e. “I want rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, …” but applied to proggros.)
John’s comment is yet another example—how many more will it take?—that there cannot possibly be a return to “the way we were”. Those halcyon days are gone forever, as dead as Dillinger. The foundational blocks that built America as the greatest society in History are no longer present in the amounts needed to reconstruct what once was. There are simply not enough of Real Men remaining who could manage that task, especially when they are under constant assault from their own government—a government of rodents.
Our present state is a temporary one, as would be that of any society that tries to bend reality to its own perversions. How and when it ends is unknown. What is known is that those who survive—and only the strongest will—will build something as yet unimagined, perhaps a new “Canticle for Leibowitz”. And this Brave New World will not have any of the corpulent, the blue-haired, the multi-pierced, the sexually confused, the effeminate, the drug-addled, the soft-muscled—for such parasites only occur upon rotten flesh.
If I had to guess, I would imagine a new-age type of Mycenean World, a world filled with men like Hector and Achilles and Ajax and Odysseus and Agamemnon and Menelaus and Priam.
As a child I was raised by my mother after my dad left her for his dead brother’s widow. I believe there are two points this author misses. 1. The majority of these missing dads, or sperm donors, would not be a ‘father’ even if they were still in the home because they did not have a father in their life either. Unless the single mothers regularly attend a good local church, there are no positive male role models for these young boys. The example of success they will see are the local thugs in gangs, with prestige, money, and fame, and music makers, or sports heroes on TV. 2. Pain. Deep soul anguish. Profound pain. I felt and experienced a never ending pain so buried deep in my soul that I was not consciously aware of it, but it manifested in feelings of abandonment, loneliness, rejection, anger, and rebellion against authority. In a few this will lead to what we see with males, either young or old, who kill, rape, rob, or plunder. Some will retreat to isolation, perversion, drug addiction, or suicide. Some will just hate. What saved me after 23 years of hell, was an amazing spiritual experience, Jesus found me and I responded.
LPJune 4, 2022, 4:37 PM
Glad you made it Dan, how did that happen?
David SmithJune 4, 2022, 8:15 AM
About 75 years ago my distant family experienced the shooting of 4 family members by another. 32 years ago I lost a brother to a teen druggie with a stolen gun. My family also had members who served our country as well as hunters.
My perspective: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws and government will have and use.
What is logic in raising age to own firearms to 21 while accepting armed forces at 18?
Continued 24/7 coverage in media results in copy cats. Enough, already. Move on. What and why does general public need to know? Emotional tugs serve no useful purpose. 2nd still rules.
The world you speak of, I’ve never known personally. It exists, in fact ESP above appears to be a participant in that madness.
I’d really enjoy hearing ESP, above’s view. I’m almost certain homo man will have the answer.
rocdoctomJune 4, 2022, 9:13 AM
I had a Father and he taught me alot. How to fix a light switch, how to repair a faucet, change the oil in a car, change a flat tire…you get the idea. Also learned to respect teachers, police, adults in general, and to treat girls/women with respect and honor. Mostly followed the rules.
the other strong men in my life were my coaches–they taught you teamwork, how to practice, how to play, how to suck it up, how to win(no gloating or showboating) and most important, how to lose as not everybody wins all the time. For example, a little talk in the locker room on Friday night after a loss with maybe some yelling, only to show up for practice on Monday ready to prepare for the next game. Good practice for life.
I place the vast majority of blame for this condition on the pablum pukers in the pulpits, be they priests or preachers, for they have taken to teaching as gospel the opinions of men.
So very true. The Catholic Church for just one has abandoned teaching about Christ, but lectures about “global warming”, immigration and the joys of sodomy. The views of anti-pope Francis and Klaus Schwab are indistinguishable.
Christianity was charged by Our Lord when He walked among us to transform the world. Instead she has herself become transformed by the world, causing no end of laughter among the demonic.
John A. Fleming. Great comment and essay, with much to chew on. I agree with most that you’ve said.
I give nothing to the state. Not congress, not any bureaucracy, nor any judges. By that, I mean the authority to regulate guns is explicitly denied to the state. There ought to be a 2A (and the other enumerated BOR) test given to any government official, issued right now today. If they fail to acknowledge my right to bear arms, in any way, shape or form, they need the boot. Let them panhandle and shit on the pavement, those sacks of excrement. I heard some congresswipe saying, with outrage, something on the order of “to hell with your freedoms!” He’s so morally superior, you see. He’s going to save the children. How about this? Disband the FBI. I wonder if school incidents would go down then? coughs.
All that to say that, John, I’ll go you one better. You say to assign gun safety training to organizations of me to train our youth. BTW, in the country a young man ought to have a rifle of some kind at about 12 years of age, and if he’s been using it properly, there is no reason not to upgrade to a modern rifle. OK, my one better and I was thinking about this yesterday before I read your good essay. Take away, by legal imperative, the control of what felons, and what mentally questionable, citizens are denied firearms sales or possession. It is codified that the state not have this power, and so let outfits like the NRA, the VFW, urban civic leagues (Lord help us), and such screen the dangerous felons or the clinically insane who need to be limited. How about the student council? Just not: the school. That’s government, you see.
HylandJune 4, 2022, 12:27 PM
I posted this link over at the Churchill video but in case you didn’t read this here’s some thoughts that coincide with what you’re saying here.
I was born in 1955 and doods in that era were around their dad’s a lot. I didn’t know anyone that didn’t have a dad, and a mother. Divorce was very rare. My mother’s youngest sister was divorced and she was pretty much shunned. She eventually remarried but she carried them scars for a long time.
My dad had his own construction company and he took my younger brother and I along all the time to job sites, to pick up materials, etc. Even at very young ages he found things for us to do, pick up nails laying around on the construction sites, trash, hold the end of a board, go fetch a tool from the truck, stuff like that. We became familiar with the process of building houses simply by being around the processes as they were being done. My dad was old skool in that he did almost all of the work on the houses he built. Today, this is rare and most of the trades are subcontracted out to a lot of different people. So my brother and I learned a little about concrete and masonry, carpentry, electricity, plumbing, landscaping, all of it. From our dad.
Dad’s job didn’t stop at 5:00 but he did change hats and we went home. After supper he would go to the garage and fix the lawn mower, the car or truck, build a new bathroom vanity cabinet, plant a new shrubbery, or just sort nuts and bolts or clean tools and put them where they belonged, and in all of it my brother and I were right there with him helping out. We, my brother and I, were like little extensions of my dad. Yes, he could do what he needed to do without us but his innate role, in raising his kids toward being functioning adults someday, was to instill in us all the things that made him who he was. We were growing into smaller, younger, versions of my dad and someday we would be full grown versions. Just like my dad’s dad did with him.
As my brother and I became young teenagers, going to public schools, being involved with sports, doing things with our friends, we were slowly being pulled away from my dad’s affect. Once, when I was about 12 or 13, after supper I was wanting to go ride my bike with my friends but my dad had other ideas. He was changing the clutch disc in my mothers 1965 Chevy stationwagen and wanted me under the car with him. He sensed I didn’t want to do that, preferring to hang with my friends, and said to me over his shoulder as we walked to the garage, “Maybe you’ll learn something and thank me someday.” His words grated me something fierce. Begrudgingly I slid under the jacked up car and we grabbed onto that bellhousing and started wrangling that splined shaft on the transmission into the mate on the clutch disc. It was not working out so well and my dad was pushed to foul language and yelling at me for not being aggressive enough in what he told me to do, but eventually they mated and slid together. I was relieved and I’m sure my dad was too. Because I was physically smaller than my dad at the time he told me to get under the transmission while at the same time he and I lifted it off the floor. He told me to bend my legs so the tail end of the transmission was resting on my knees and between my arms around the bell housing and my knees on the tranny I was able to manipulate the whole thing so that he could apply pressure from the end and push the two mating shafts together. I am going somewhere with this.
When I was 19, about 6 or 7 years later, I had a 1970 Camaro SS with a 4 speed and I was burning the tires off all the time. Once, while doing a burnout, the clutch disc disintegrated and car would no longer move. My dad and I towed it home and as punishment for doing the burnouts after he warned me about them numerous times he said he wasn’t going to help me fix it. So I layed on my back under that Camaro and with my arms around the bell housing and my, now long, knees on the tranny I wrangled it into place with much cursing. After I was done and was cleaning my hands off with gas, but the car was still up on the jacks, my dad came out and without a word slid under the car and rolled his eyes all over the important stuff, to make sure I got it right. To him, it was his duty to make sure I had learned properly what he had taught me years before on my mothers station wagon. He never said a word, just slid out from under and went back into the house and started reading his Readers Digest again. I still did burnouts now and then but not nearly as much as I had before. See, my dad’s reality had forced me into realizing the consequences of my behavior while I was laying on my back in that Florida heat fixing my ride.
Learning happens every single day, it’s built-in human nature, and whatever we expose ourselves to is what we learn. If you blob out on the couch and watch sportsball, you’ll learn just that. If you involve yourself with something you had never done before, or if you do something you have done before, you will learn those things and learn them even better. Learning has no limit and you will do it til you die so it’s seems the best way to approach it would be to learn things of a wide array.
My dad died of a heart attack in 1980 at age 47 and I was 25, so he never met my wife or my son nor did he know that I was a business owner of my own architectural firm. To my dad I was just always his kid and even though I had been in the army for 4 years I was not married and creating a family and was mostly still just a kid. He never knew the me I became and have been for the past 42 years since he died. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about my dad in one way or another. In the various things I busy myself with here at the homestead that I had learned in whole or part from him. Or in conversations with my son where he relates something he had to do that he learned from me that I learned from my dad, and maybe my dad learned from my grandfather. Just like that, in an instant during a phone call, I can span more than a century of life and experience between my son and my dad and my grandfather, who was born in 1900 and has been dead since I was 5 in 1960. Our son’s 7 yo daughter, though not male, will invariably inherit some of the behaviors that have been passed down from my grandfather and perhaps she will pass them onto her kids one day. THIS is how you make history. From eyeball to eyeball, words to words, experiences to experiences, from teaching to learning, from parent to child.
It wasn’t my intent to leave my mother out of this. Up til now I hadn’t mentioned her. Her family influence was primarily to my 2 sisters, but she still had strong influence on myself and my 2 younger brothers. I still roll my clean socks up like she showed me when I was 8 and I still prefer, like her, mercurochrome over merthiolate, and I make my legendary chicken stew like she did, starting with a whole chicken.
My grandmother taught me how to spell my lengthy first, middle, and last names and how to count to 20 before I entered kindergarten at age 4, and my grandfather taught me how to ride a horse and pick blackberry’s by the same age. All of these things and many more created who I am and all of it was done through almost daily physical interaction between a wide network many family members in a small mostly rural community that was mostly hands on and absent many of the luxuries we have today. Our family was our entertainment and a huge part of our overall learning experience that lasted all of our lives. Eventually many of the fambly members died, or moved off, and became detached though still “connected” and continued on with their lives as they could. But now a days something is lost, or has become lost, and though the losing was very slow over time the net results are now obvious. Our only grandchild has no knowledge at all, and never will, that she has great aunts living in different parts of the country, and what good would it do for her to know that? What would do her good is for her to walk down the road a ways to her great aunts house and sit and chat with her for a spell and maybe look at some pictures in one of the photo albums.
LPJune 4, 2022, 4:50 PM
That’s a great memorial and tribute to your Dad, and your Mom too, and to a way of life that seems to be lost. I wish it wasn’t. I think most or all of us don’t want it to be lost. I hope that your only grandchild will discover some of it, hopefully through you.
Ghost: You wrote a beautiful homage to your family, to your youth, and to a world that seems these days to be gone with the wind.
Snakepit KansasJune 5, 2022, 5:33 AM
Unfortunately, in spite of how hard it tries, the Gubmint has no solution when someone grows up without the likes of Ghost’s parents.
Boat GuyJune 5, 2022, 5:44 AM
That world is NOT gone. It has changed more in appearance than substance. It can still be found; most easily in rural parts of “flyover” country but it is alive in the suburbs too.
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Green Pants Interior by Klahn
Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
Where are the fathers of all these broken young men? Young men who are raised and schooled by women, preyed upon by proggro shrinks, and have no examples and no discipline in how to be a man. Bereft, their only recourse to become the hard man they yearn to be is to shoot up a school. Where are the scumbag fathers of these broken young men, and why are they not taken to account? Have the scumbag mothers and courts chased them away and out of their sons’ lives? As fathers, we have abandoned our sons to our enemies.
Gerard Van der Leun
Comments on this entry are closed.
Men are a construct of the white male patriarchy.
Hey butt plug go talk shit to your Hershey highway butt pirate pal!
John’s comment is yet another example—how many more will it take?—that there cannot possibly be a return to “the way we were”. Those halcyon days are gone forever, as dead as Dillinger. The foundational blocks that built America as the greatest society in History are no longer present in the amounts needed to reconstruct what once was. There are simply not enough of Real Men remaining who could manage that task, especially when they are under constant assault from their own government—a government of rodents.
Our present state is a temporary one, as would be that of any society that tries to bend reality to its own perversions. How and when it ends is unknown. What is known is that those who survive—and only the strongest will—will build something as yet unimagined, perhaps a new “Canticle for Leibowitz”. And this Brave New World will not have any of the corpulent, the blue-haired, the multi-pierced, the sexually confused, the effeminate, the drug-addled, the soft-muscled—for such parasites only occur upon rotten flesh.
If I had to guess, I would imagine a new-age type of Mycenean World, a world filled with men like Hector and Achilles and Ajax and Odysseus and Agamemnon and Menelaus and Priam.
We could do worse. We could not do much better.
Stephen Baskerville has written extensively regarding “Dad: MIA” and the damage instilled in boys and suffered by society at large. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/06/the_real_reason_why_mass_shooters_kill.html
As a child I was raised by my mother after my dad left her for his dead brother’s widow. I believe there are two points this author misses. 1. The majority of these missing dads, or sperm donors, would not be a ‘father’ even if they were still in the home because they did not have a father in their life either. Unless the single mothers regularly attend a good local church, there are no positive male role models for these young boys. The example of success they will see are the local thugs in gangs, with prestige, money, and fame, and music makers, or sports heroes on TV. 2. Pain. Deep soul anguish. Profound pain. I felt and experienced a never ending pain so buried deep in my soul that I was not consciously aware of it, but it manifested in feelings of abandonment, loneliness, rejection, anger, and rebellion against authority. In a few this will lead to what we see with males, either young or old, who kill, rape, rob, or plunder. Some will retreat to isolation, perversion, drug addiction, or suicide. Some will just hate. What saved me after 23 years of hell, was an amazing spiritual experience, Jesus found me and I responded.
Glad you made it Dan, how did that happen?
About 75 years ago my distant family experienced the shooting of 4 family members by another. 32 years ago I lost a brother to a teen druggie with a stolen gun. My family also had members who served our country as well as hunters.
My perspective: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws and government will have and use.
What is logic in raising age to own firearms to 21 while accepting armed forces at 18?
Continued 24/7 coverage in media results in copy cats. Enough, already. Move on. What and why does general public need to know? Emotional tugs serve no useful purpose. 2nd still rules.
The world you speak of, I’ve never known personally. It exists, in fact ESP above appears to be a participant in that madness.
I’d really enjoy hearing ESP, above’s view. I’m almost certain homo man will have the answer.
I had a Father and he taught me alot. How to fix a light switch, how to repair a faucet, change the oil in a car, change a flat tire…you get the idea. Also learned to respect teachers, police, adults in general, and to treat girls/women with respect and honor. Mostly followed the rules.
the other strong men in my life were my coaches–they taught you teamwork, how to practice, how to play, how to suck it up, how to win(no gloating or showboating) and most important, how to lose as not everybody wins all the time. For example, a little talk in the locker room on Friday night after a loss with maybe some yelling, only to show up for practice on Monday ready to prepare for the next game. Good practice for life.
Sometimes the comments are high toned and/or thoughtful.
Sometimes they ain’t.
I place the vast majority of blame for this condition on the pablum pukers in the pulpits, be they priests or preachers, for they have taken to teaching as gospel the opinions of men.
So very true. The Catholic Church for just one has abandoned teaching about Christ, but lectures about “global warming”, immigration and the joys of sodomy. The views of anti-pope Francis and Klaus Schwab are indistinguishable.
Christianity was charged by Our Lord when He walked among us to transform the world. Instead she has herself become transformed by the world, causing no end of laughter among the demonic.
Mr. Joe Krill. Succinct as usual. Home run baby.
John A. Fleming. Great comment and essay, with much to chew on. I agree with most that you’ve said.
I give nothing to the state. Not congress, not any bureaucracy, nor any judges. By that, I mean the authority to regulate guns is explicitly denied to the state. There ought to be a 2A (and the other enumerated BOR) test given to any government official, issued right now today. If they fail to acknowledge my right to bear arms, in any way, shape or form, they need the boot. Let them panhandle and shit on the pavement, those sacks of excrement. I heard some congresswipe saying, with outrage, something on the order of “to hell with your freedoms!” He’s so morally superior, you see. He’s going to save the children. How about this? Disband the FBI. I wonder if school incidents would go down then? coughs.
All that to say that, John, I’ll go you one better. You say to assign gun safety training to organizations of me to train our youth. BTW, in the country a young man ought to have a rifle of some kind at about 12 years of age, and if he’s been using it properly, there is no reason not to upgrade to a modern rifle. OK, my one better and I was thinking about this yesterday before I read your good essay. Take away, by legal imperative, the control of what felons, and what mentally questionable, citizens are denied firearms sales or possession. It is codified that the state not have this power, and so let outfits like the NRA, the VFW, urban civic leagues (Lord help us), and such screen the dangerous felons or the clinically insane who need to be limited. How about the student council? Just not: the school. That’s government, you see.
I posted this link over at the Churchill video but in case you didn’t read this here’s some thoughts that coincide with what you’re saying here.
https://voxday.net/2022/05/29/the-staged-show-in-texas/
idk how that posted without my name: Casey
I was born in 1955 and doods in that era were around their dad’s a lot. I didn’t know anyone that didn’t have a dad, and a mother. Divorce was very rare. My mother’s youngest sister was divorced and she was pretty much shunned. She eventually remarried but she carried them scars for a long time.
My dad had his own construction company and he took my younger brother and I along all the time to job sites, to pick up materials, etc. Even at very young ages he found things for us to do, pick up nails laying around on the construction sites, trash, hold the end of a board, go fetch a tool from the truck, stuff like that. We became familiar with the process of building houses simply by being around the processes as they were being done. My dad was old skool in that he did almost all of the work on the houses he built. Today, this is rare and most of the trades are subcontracted out to a lot of different people. So my brother and I learned a little about concrete and masonry, carpentry, electricity, plumbing, landscaping, all of it. From our dad.
Dad’s job didn’t stop at 5:00 but he did change hats and we went home. After supper he would go to the garage and fix the lawn mower, the car or truck, build a new bathroom vanity cabinet, plant a new shrubbery, or just sort nuts and bolts or clean tools and put them where they belonged, and in all of it my brother and I were right there with him helping out. We, my brother and I, were like little extensions of my dad. Yes, he could do what he needed to do without us but his innate role, in raising his kids toward being functioning adults someday, was to instill in us all the things that made him who he was. We were growing into smaller, younger, versions of my dad and someday we would be full grown versions. Just like my dad’s dad did with him.
As my brother and I became young teenagers, going to public schools, being involved with sports, doing things with our friends, we were slowly being pulled away from my dad’s affect. Once, when I was about 12 or 13, after supper I was wanting to go ride my bike with my friends but my dad had other ideas. He was changing the clutch disc in my mothers 1965 Chevy stationwagen and wanted me under the car with him. He sensed I didn’t want to do that, preferring to hang with my friends, and said to me over his shoulder as we walked to the garage, “Maybe you’ll learn something and thank me someday.” His words grated me something fierce. Begrudgingly I slid under the jacked up car and we grabbed onto that bellhousing and started wrangling that splined shaft on the transmission into the mate on the clutch disc. It was not working out so well and my dad was pushed to foul language and yelling at me for not being aggressive enough in what he told me to do, but eventually they mated and slid together. I was relieved and I’m sure my dad was too. Because I was physically smaller than my dad at the time he told me to get under the transmission while at the same time he and I lifted it off the floor. He told me to bend my legs so the tail end of the transmission was resting on my knees and between my arms around the bell housing and my knees on the tranny I was able to manipulate the whole thing so that he could apply pressure from the end and push the two mating shafts together. I am going somewhere with this.
When I was 19, about 6 or 7 years later, I had a 1970 Camaro SS with a 4 speed and I was burning the tires off all the time. Once, while doing a burnout, the clutch disc disintegrated and car would no longer move. My dad and I towed it home and as punishment for doing the burnouts after he warned me about them numerous times he said he wasn’t going to help me fix it. So I layed on my back under that Camaro and with my arms around the bell housing and my, now long, knees on the tranny I wrangled it into place with much cursing. After I was done and was cleaning my hands off with gas, but the car was still up on the jacks, my dad came out and without a word slid under the car and rolled his eyes all over the important stuff, to make sure I got it right. To him, it was his duty to make sure I had learned properly what he had taught me years before on my mothers station wagon. He never said a word, just slid out from under and went back into the house and started reading his Readers Digest again. I still did burnouts now and then but not nearly as much as I had before. See, my dad’s reality had forced me into realizing the consequences of my behavior while I was laying on my back in that Florida heat fixing my ride.
Learning happens every single day, it’s built-in human nature, and whatever we expose ourselves to is what we learn. If you blob out on the couch and watch sportsball, you’ll learn just that. If you involve yourself with something you had never done before, or if you do something you have done before, you will learn those things and learn them even better. Learning has no limit and you will do it til you die so it’s seems the best way to approach it would be to learn things of a wide array.
My dad died of a heart attack in 1980 at age 47 and I was 25, so he never met my wife or my son nor did he know that I was a business owner of my own architectural firm. To my dad I was just always his kid and even though I had been in the army for 4 years I was not married and creating a family and was mostly still just a kid. He never knew the me I became and have been for the past 42 years since he died. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about my dad in one way or another. In the various things I busy myself with here at the homestead that I had learned in whole or part from him. Or in conversations with my son where he relates something he had to do that he learned from me that I learned from my dad, and maybe my dad learned from my grandfather. Just like that, in an instant during a phone call, I can span more than a century of life and experience between my son and my dad and my grandfather, who was born in 1900 and has been dead since I was 5 in 1960. Our son’s 7 yo daughter, though not male, will invariably inherit some of the behaviors that have been passed down from my grandfather and perhaps she will pass them onto her kids one day. THIS is how you make history. From eyeball to eyeball, words to words, experiences to experiences, from teaching to learning, from parent to child.
It wasn’t my intent to leave my mother out of this. Up til now I hadn’t mentioned her. Her family influence was primarily to my 2 sisters, but she still had strong influence on myself and my 2 younger brothers. I still roll my clean socks up like she showed me when I was 8 and I still prefer, like her, mercurochrome over merthiolate, and I make my legendary chicken stew like she did, starting with a whole chicken.
My grandmother taught me how to spell my lengthy first, middle, and last names and how to count to 20 before I entered kindergarten at age 4, and my grandfather taught me how to ride a horse and pick blackberry’s by the same age. All of these things and many more created who I am and all of it was done through almost daily physical interaction between a wide network many family members in a small mostly rural community that was mostly hands on and absent many of the luxuries we have today. Our family was our entertainment and a huge part of our overall learning experience that lasted all of our lives. Eventually many of the fambly members died, or moved off, and became detached though still “connected” and continued on with their lives as they could. But now a days something is lost, or has become lost, and though the losing was very slow over time the net results are now obvious. Our only grandchild has no knowledge at all, and never will, that she has great aunts living in different parts of the country, and what good would it do for her to know that? What would do her good is for her to walk down the road a ways to her great aunts house and sit and chat with her for a spell and maybe look at some pictures in one of the photo albums.
That’s a great memorial and tribute to your Dad, and your Mom too, and to a way of life that seems to be lost. I wish it wasn’t. I think most or all of us don’t want it to be lost. I hope that your only grandchild will discover some of it, hopefully through you.
Ghost: You wrote a beautiful homage to your family, to your youth, and to a world that seems these days to be gone with the wind.
Unfortunately, in spite of how hard it tries, the Gubmint has no solution when someone grows up without the likes of Ghost’s parents.
That world is NOT gone. It has changed more in appearance than substance. It can still be found; most easily in rural parts of “flyover” country but it is alive in the suburbs too.