March of every year brings my father's birthday. While I won't go into all the details of why he's so special to me, suffice it to say that I love, respect, and admire him for every reason most everyone else loves their fathers - plus quite a few more reasons that hardly matter in the grand scheme of life.
Anyway, I have a strong desire to "collect" the wisdom of people, especially family, like my Dad. It really came to light to me as I've gotten older and realized I never took the time to do such things with folks that have already gone from this world. Their experiences, lessons, stories and insights are gone - lost forever. That is a tragedy.
In any case, as kind of a companion gift for the micro-cassette recorder that my brother gave our Dad, I wanted to focus my Dad's usual creative writing skills to documenting the stories (and yarns) that he's lived, heard, made up and told over the years. I found a Christian-based journal that contained questions or idea statements on every page to prompt the journaling for the day. Well, he had the thing done, with added appendix pages and pictures in under 2 months.
Little did I know that once he completed it, he was scheming - which I should have expected. I did wonder when he planned to give it to my boys, which was my original intention, but I hadn't heard anything about it for some time. Then, Father's Day 2005 rolled up and with it, my Dad's completed journal. It was a bit worse for wear as it apparently got quite the work out in the weeks he worked on it, but it was completely priceless to me.
I cracked it open and started to read. 3 days later, after reading it just about every free moment I had, I had finished it. So many things in there. So many lessons and so much wisdom in those few pages.
Case in point: Dad exercised his gift of gab by ever so delicately manipulating the answers to the questions he didn't like in such a way that the lesson was given without divulging what may have been more than he wanted his grandchildren to know. That's cool. I think it's good to keep a bit of suspense. I always want them to have a little piece of him they don't understand. I never have. :)
My only hope after getting this book is that it's just the beginning. I hope that Dad continues building the gift of knowledge he's built and collected through his life. It would certainly be priceless to me and would be cherished for generations.
Later.