Father's Day Weekend

Father's Day always falls right around the same time as my grandfather's birthday. Were he still alive, he would have celebrated 99 years four days ago. The longer I'm around, the more I feel the echos of my father's influence and my grandfather's influence on me. Every time I tape up the corners of an envelope to ready another baseball card trade for mailing, I remember Papa teaching me how to properly prepare books for mailing when he'd hire me to get the quarterly mailings out for his poetry publishing business. When I check street signs and mile markers to know exactly where I am and what I just passed, I hear my Dad's voice asking me what street we just passed when he was teaching me how to drive. That I have been blessed to have a career in software development is almost certainly due to learning to program on my grandfather's Laser 128 and Compaq 386 computers. Crawling under my old Saturn (a gift from my grandparents in 2003) to do an oil change always reminds me of my Dad teaching me the same lessons on our Ford van. Now I'm asking my own kids to hand me tools, and hoping they learn the same lessons. I won't be around forever. I hope that the Lord blesses me with a good long span of days like He gave my grandfather, but even those will pass with time. I hope that my own children will here the echos of my lessons in their lives one day, and that those lessons will be happy and beneficial.