Father's Day

Since I am digitizing vast numbers of old pictures, I will share this of my father. Here he is at perhaps age 12 in around 1917. He seems to have been a happy child. He always loved dachshunds; he called them "weenie pups."

He lived a long life, a life that seemed uneventful, even constrained, to me. He didn't much like events. He did not seek out new experiences. He thrived on doing his duty as he conceived it, going to work, passing his days with great order and regularity. He was a bookkeeper/accountant for a wholesale hardware business. His slow, diligent, careful accuracy was eventually made superfluous by computing power.

I think I am glad he didn't live to see the Tea Party. He might have felt at home with their seething resentment against contemporary life, against social changes, against unfamiliar people and customs. Or then again, perhaps not. He didn't approve of upsetting apple carts.

He loved my mother and me.