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LIFE IS A VACUUM CLEANER
Wednesday Mar. 4, 2015
I love my daughters.
Like most parents, easy to answer that universal question:
“of course I love them both, love them the same, love them just as much”.
I’m sure all parents agree that, “with a first born, there are differences”.
Children bring incalculable memories – places in time, pains, gains, experiences.
Stories for telling. Retelling.
For recalling in quiet moments. Alone. Right here. Now.
We brag-up how their lives touched ours, touched others.
Making their path, slashing their trail.
They have. They did. As we did.
Trails so different.
So same.
Discovering so many things we’ve discovered.
Different times, different places, they’ve put us through our paces.
As we did them.
We gave them our most those first twenty years.
Children keep giving back.
Not in thanks or for appreciation.
They provide perspective we cannot glean any other way.
We gain. Grow. Accumulate. Having children – like vacuum cleaner attachments – we don’t always know where they are or what they’re doing or their purpose but together we are assembled, a family. Some parts go missing for a while but in time they get reconnected.
When daughter Carla was born, thirty-seven years ago this morning, she met essential criteria: ten fingers, ten toes, pink, warm, healthy.
Remembering her arrival, isn’t about daughterhood or fatherhood – tectonic shift – from youth-to-responsibility happens when we have children, when our first arrives.
Forever changes us. Nothing lost or taken away – we don’t lose free-spirit, free thought or our freewheeling ways.
You will always be my first child.
In the moment of your birth – your first action in life, you made me your dad.
I’m so glad.
Happy birthday Carla.
Mark Kolke
column written/ published from Calgary, AB
morning walk: -16C/3F, calm, clear and cold again/still, early pre-sunrise light pushing dark away so we can see the day. Gusta wanted a longer walk, but I wanted to go to the gym, so I won that debate …
Reader feedback:
AUTHENTICITY
Hi Mark – I liked your use of “cogitate” – a new word for me: thanks! Off to Mexico tomorrow! , MK, Calgary, AB
Is it just me or does it seem as a lot of people have forsaken authenticity for an 'academy award' winning performance of who they would like to be? Maybe I am meeting the wrong people or is it possible I initiate that type of response to meeting me? I don't know how to be anyone but myself so I hope no one is suspecting me of putting on airs as my grandmother would say. Of course, this was the same woman who instructed me to keep the family's dirty laundry in the laundry room and not to set it out to air in the public. Just thinking out loud...GW, Bon Wier, Tx.
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