Less Than Perfect

There was a song some years ago, more years than I care to remember, with the title "The Greatest Man I Never Knew".  I connected strongly with the song when I heard it.  The song tells of a man who works hard but has a hard time connecting to his family.  I knew, and didn't know, that man.  He was my own father. My father died earlier this year after a long battle with cancer.  He is now the greatest man I will never know.  It is a strange feeling to close a door to a relationship that scarcely existed in the first place.  I am sad for the loss of him, but perhaps even sadder for the loss of what might have been. My father was a quiet man.  He was never one for long, deep conversations, at least not that I ever saw.  He communicated what was necessary.  He held so much in.  He grumbled under his breath.  I can't tell you how he ever felt about most anything.  Except I know he loved God, or at least he wanted to.  And I know he loved his family, or at least he wan

I still have a clear memory of myself at age 18 in Big Lots, shopping with my mother.  She was helping me buy supplies before I headed off to college.  Her, squatting and rifling through stacks of paper pads; me, watching, on the verge of adulthood but still very much used to being catered to by my mother. I remember that when my mom would talk to her sister, they compared notes on children.  Each anecdote about one sister's child would be answered with an anecdote about the other sister's child.  Points of pride shared like pieces of currency.  Each mother rubbing her mental thumb over the bits of knowledge she had collected about her child, like smoothing a stone in her hand.  One such note I recall my mother sharing was the type of notebook paper I liked.  "Meloney likes the college ruled.  The kind with a perforated edge." My mother didn't graduate high school.  She didn't live long enough for me to get to a phase where I might have asked her about tha