My Father Was The Quintessential

I Decided In My Life That I Would Do Nothing That Did Not Reflect Positively On My Father's Life.

I Want My Great-granddaughter To Have A Fairly Good Understanding Of The World In Which I Lived For 81 Years And Also The World Before I Came Into It - All The Way Back A Hundred Thousand Years, To The Beginning Of Our Species.

Child Psychologists Have Demonstrated That Our Minds Are Actually Constructed By These Thousands Of Tiny Interactions During The First Few Years Of Life. We Aren't Just What We're Taught. It's What We Experience During Those Early Years - A Smile Here, A Jarring Sound There - That Creates The Pathways And Connections Of The Brain. We Put Our Kids To Fifteen Years Of Quick-cut Advertising, Passive Television Watching, And Sadistic Video Games, And We Expect To See Emerge A New Generation Of Calm, Compassionate, And Engaged Human Beings?

But Perhaps More Important, As Someone Wishing To Make A Comment Or Two About Contemporary Life And Values, I Don't Have To Dig Through Libraries Or Travel To Exotic Lands To Arrive At A View Of Our Modern Situation Refracted Through The Lens Of The Preindustrial World, Or The Uncommercialized, Unfranchised, Perhaps Unsanitized-and Therefore Supposedly More "authentic"-perspective Ofthe Third World. Very Simply, This Is Because That "other" World, As Alien As If Separated By Centuries In Time, Is The One From Which I Came

My Father Was A Tomato Farmer. There Is The Phrase That Says He Or She Worked Their Fingers To The Bone, Well, That's My Dad. And He Was A Very Good Man.