This photo of my dad holding my twin brother Timothy likely taken close to the day we came home after a little incubation at the beginning of 1954 surely has a companion picture with yours truly in the same position.
I couldn’t find it. Going through family pictures today I quickly realized my dad is the one taking almost every picture. I didn’t find any pictures with us both in the frame.
When I think of my dad, I reflect on a number of amusing incidents, and, in reflecting on myself and my endowment, consider the several ways I am much like my father, besides sharing his perfect Calhoun nose. I’m grateful for the positive aspects, and so I’m thankful for being intelligent, charming, fearless, and, until recently, for replicating to a great extent his tidy, athletic physical stature.
On the other hand, I am really quite different too, and count my lucky stars I’m not messianic or a warrior, not quick to anger, and not enthusiastically certain about very much. That I’m not like him in these ways are the highlights of my opposing compensation.
There aren’t pictures of us together after a specific point because I finally begged off being trained into a crew member–sailboat racer–and so after 1967, my dad left me alone. Scroll ahead twenty-six years. He’s sixty-nine and I’m thirty-nine. He and I are sitting in his home office–I had returned to Cleveland the year before after eighteen years elsewhere–and he’s asked me what I’m interested in, only to answer,
“Psychology is crap, Stephen.”
Nevertheless, he and I spent some quality moments together in what turned out to be the last decade of his life, and I guess I forgot to say we both possessed an often puerile and bawdy wit. So, we laughed together a bunch.
