fathers-and-daughters

He had accessorized his life with everything but paternal instinct.

I know that throughout my life I have struggled to forgive my father. Now, as I get older, I wish most of all that he had been able to find a way to forgive himself.

Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even than his pipe, and, like a reasonable man and an excellent father, let her have her way in everything.

When I was twenty-something, I asked my father, __hen did you start feeling like a grownup?_ His response: __ever.

It was common for my father to sit my sisters down and tell them things like, "I saw a girl working in the bank in town, and she was a girl just like you." My parents had never completed primary school. They couldn't speak English or even read that well. My parents only knew the language of numbers, buying and selling, but they wanted more for their kids. That's why my father had scraped the money together and kept Annie in school, despite the famine and other troubles.

All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.

I had never confronted my parents with the true feelings I had for them, and I had certainly never expressed the depth of my feeling for my mother, being too selfish to try when I should have.

Help your fatherAs he ages And loses his strengthFor it was he who sheltered youAnd protected you from the stormsKhoiSan Book of Wisdom

I was a boy that age once, and I know that 97.7 percent of their bodies are semen and the 2.8 percent is an incendiary device for spraying it.

I wish you a beautiful blessed Father__ Day.

Geoffrey's own heart felt inconveniently large just then.

I can be anything I want to be. Just wait and you will see. Only time will tell what I will be.

Fathers and daughters have a special bond. She is always daddy's little girl.

ArtifactAs long as I can remember you kept the rifle--your grandfather's an antique you called it-in your study, propped against the tall shelvesthat held your many books. Upright,beside those hard-worn spins, it was anotherbackbone of your pas, a remnant I studiedas if it might unlock-- like the skeleton keyits long body resembled-- some door i had yetto find. Peering into the dark muzzle, I imagined a bulletas you described: spiraling through the boreand spinning straight for its target. It did not hit methen: the rifle I'd inherited showing mehow one life is bound to another, that hardshipendures. For years I admired its slender profile,until-- late one night, somber with drink--you told meit still worked, that you kept it loaded just in case,and I saw the rifle for what it is; a relicsharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret.

He sweeps her hair back from her ears; he swings her above his head. He says she is his émerveillement. He says he will never leave her, not in a million years.

A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.

The father and daughter made their way north, through unknown sylvan paradises where only the owls and skunks know their way around. The hard work of paddling non-stop for many hours had long since stopped being difficult for Saweyimew. In spite of her beauty and grace, her back had grown strong and sinewy from years of canoe trips. She reveled in the exhilaration it always brought her, after the first few hours left her body insensible to pain or discomfort. Warm and tingly, lulled into peaceful contemplation by hours of the rhythmic paddling, the smell of the water, exotic blooms, animal musk. It all combined as one to make her feel so alive. Especially when it rained, and her body steamed against the cool drops, feeling invincible against the elements. The mountain of her father's back was like a rock against anything nature could throw against them. The stream of fragrant pipe-smoke still flowing from his lips, regardless of any obstacle. She felt at that moment, nothing would ever stop her father's pipe from smoking. Nothing, not death, not any force of the living or spirit world, would ever still her father's heart. Rain cleansing her to the core, she was a spring of raw power and self-reliance, paddling against all adversity--their master completely. Her father's daughter. At times like that, when it rained, she entirely understood and shared her father's outlook on life.

Incidentally, I have also learned a bit about the importance of avoiding feminine embarrassment ('Daddy,' wrote Sophia when she enrolled at the New School where I teach, 'people will ask "why is old Christopher Hitchens kissing that girl?"') and shall now cease and desist.