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Meditation on Father’s Day by Jack Sharman

June 17, 2016| Posted By Charles Gaston

Jackson-R-Sharman-Jr

[Ed. note: originally posted in 2014]

At age 53, I am now one year older than my father was when he died.

For many years, I rarely thought of Daddy.  Primarily, I thought about him every January 6, the anniversary of the day he died. Annually, this is a day upon which my mother and I have the same conversation, rehearsed and hushed.  I loved him, and one might expect me to have thought of him more often, to have honored him, but I did not, at least not until recently.  Before you draw too many conclusions, though, bear in mind that I could not see him clearly.

Have you ever looked through the wrong end of a telescope?  The object at which you gaze looks tiny, and slightly blurred at the edges.  The object – a tree, a person – is as impossibly distant as the moon is impossibly close when you turn the telescope right way around.  When my father died, I had just turned twelve.  Although precocious in some ways, I saw him with a child’s eyes, and never after that did my eyes change, at least the eyes with which I saw him.  Time passed; I aged, and everything around me changed and aged; but not the eyes with which I struggled to see him.  Time passed, but my eyes for my father remained unchanged, a child’s eyes in man’s body.  I went further and further down the wrong end of the telescope.

It was only when I became a father, and then approached his death-age and surpassed it, did I understand a little better who he was, and that I could quicken with memory that tiny figure moving in sepia grace at the wrong end of the telescope…

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