Letter to my children

Recently, something put me in mind of what I should leave my three children. You may have considered what to leave your children, too. If not, I encourage you either never to consider the matter, or to consider it now, while you can still read Florida Weekly and demonstrate a respectable level of acumen.

I quickly made a list. It includes only three possessions and a single letter of definitions. You may choose to gift some of these, as well. Here they are:

POSSESSION ONE: Retreats for each boy on a barrier island and in the Rocky Mountains. Thanks to Harry Truman and Teddy Roosevelt who established the parks, my sons will always be able to find campsites in the Ten Thousand Islands, part of Everglades National Park, and in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

POSSESSION TWO: A check for $1 million, each. I learned how to do this from my oldest son, Evan, who as a late teen once drew out his checkbook and wrote me a check for $1 million. In the memo line he scribbled, “Happy Father’s Day.”

Roger Williams

POSSESSION THREE: All of my books. Most of them are in the public library, but I consider them mine, and I give them to my children (and yours, too), to be shared equally.

And finally the letter. Mine goes like this.

DEAR BOYS,

I’ve spent decades discovering that I know very little about the world.

But here are a few things I want to share, concepts that might be immutable. I learned most of them from my father and mother. A woman named Amy — you may know her — then helped me understand them more fully.

In my country and I predict in the one you inherit beyond me, these notions will remain right as rain. Like everything else, though, I expect you to slap them on the anvil and reshape them to your own lives as you see fit, with the best hammer you can swing. Let me just define them.

Love: An action taken for the good of another — sometimes sacrificial, frequently shared, occasionally undefined, at best pleasurable, always valuable.

Alone among the rest, love is a reality not subject to other realities, such as death. On the other hand, it won’t feed you, either. That’s up to you.

Maturity: The ability to recognize and acknowledge your mistakes and to carry on without carrying them on.

Stability, mental or physical: The ability to breathe in and out while standing upright, with your eyes open.

Rationality: The ability to recognize that truth on some occasions will not be a sum of facts, and facts may sometimes resist a claim of truth.

Generosity: Offering what you have, when it should be offered. Not offering what you don’t have, or offering what you have when the timing is wrong.

Hypocrisy: The ability to point out authoritatively what should be done, and even what must be done, without flinching when you remember that you didn’t do it. To be practiced only if you can’t or shouldn’t lead by example.

Memory: Usually, a 10-fold distillation consisting of five parts real, two parts fading light, and one part each of approximation, character and make-believe.

Good Advice: A map of the terrain ahead, which may or may not be accurate or helpful and will never prove detailed enough to describe everything you will encounter there.

Courage: Being scared as hell and doing your job, anyway.

Grace: The ability to smile and mean it, under pressure.

Tolerance: The ability to let others behave badly, reason poorly, carry on stupidly and understand either less or more about the world than you do — or understand it differently — without resenting or despising them. Tolerance does not mean allowing others to implicate you in their behavior, or threaten those you love.

Just War: The need and right to kill someone who intends to kill you, and has demonstrated that intention one way or another.

Beauty: That which when seen, pleases. In itself, a thing without virtue.

Art: A fanciful celebration of the real.

Poetry: An anatomical language made only of the muscle, sinew and bone of reality.

Reality: The stone that hurts when you kick it, the air that inspires when you breath it, the fire that burns when you touch it, and the water that replenishes when you drink it. Also, the love that nourishes when you have given it or taken it.

Sex without love: Well, it happens.

Sex with love: You have shifted up into the joy gear, now.

Honesty: The ability to see events and actions — yours or those of others — without favor or disfavor to yourself. Not merely the ability to point out a fact whenever you see it.

Death: That undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, as Shakespeare said before traveling there. Put another way: The act of joining the stars.

Compassion: The ability to see the need in those with less, or in those with greater trouble or suffering, and to try to alleviate it.

Grit: Not speed, not certainty, not advantage. Merely the ability never to quit, no matter how dire a circumstance, or how extreme the exhaustion.

Endurance: The capacity to carry on through difficulty, exhaustion or calamity and remain mostly stable, rational and courageous. This might mean the death of loved ones, the failure of one dream or another, your own momentary weakness, the visitation of a pandemic, or even the destruction of cities or populations — any calamities large or small, public or personal.

Parents: People who are always right, even when they aren’t.

Love, Dad. ¦

Note: A Father’s Day rumination, this commentary previously ran in 2021.

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