Happy Father's Day

What makes a good father?

A hundred years ago, Sonora Smart Dodd was sitting in church one Sunday when she came up with the idea of a national Father's Day on the order of Mother's Day. It took 57 years before President Lyndon Johnson issued a proclamation in 1966 making it the national holiday we celebrate today. Before and since, much has been said about fathers and fatherhood, the good and the bad, and we thought it appropriate to offer you a sampling. Perhaps you'll find a description that fits your own father, or, for the men, the father you are today:

"I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week."

-- Mario Cuomo

"You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular." --Robert Frost

"A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he's in there, as if he needed company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station."

-- Bill Cosby

"A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma."

-- Marlene Dietrich

"Lucky that man whose children make his happiness in life and not his grief, the anguished disappointment of his hopes." --Euripedes

"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud

"My father died many years ago, and yet when something special happens to me, I talk to him secretly not really knowing whether he hears, but it makes me feel better to half believe it." -- Natasha Josefowitz

"The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, 'Daddy, I need to ask you something,' he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan." -- Garrison Keillor

"My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it." -- Clarence Budington Kelland

"When I was a kid, I said to my father one afternoon, 'Daddy, will you take me to the zoo?' He answered, 'If the zoo wants you, let them come and get you.'" -- Jerry Lewis

"Honor thy father and thy mother." -- Matthew 19:19

"Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance." -- Ruth E. Renkel

"An angry father is most cruel towards himself."

-- Publilius Syrus

"A man's children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season." --Unknown

"By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong."

-- Charles Wadsworth

"My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, 'You're tearing up the grass.' 'We're not raising grass,' Dad would reply. 'We're raising boys.'" -- Harmon Killebrew

"A father is a guy who has snapshots in his wallet where his money used to be." -- Unknown

"Never raise your hand to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected." -- Red Buttons

"Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life."

-- Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

Fathers come in all shapes and sizes and with all varying temperaments. A father’s love is different than a mother’s love but just as important or just as damaging, if withheld. If you are lucky enough to have a father… whether he is your birth father, adoptive father, step-father or guardian who loves you and is really there for you, you start life with a big step ahead of those who didn’t. Make sure you take the time to thank him and to honor him in your heart.

--Marion Algier, Daily Thought Pad

Source: The Salt Lake Tribune - Tribune Editorial Updated: 06/19/2009 07:25:51 PM MDT - Posted: Fox Nation

On Huckabee this weekend the former governor and presidential candidate spoke of a prison program where each of the prisoners could have a free card to mail their Mothers for Mother’s Day. The participation was overwhelming and almost every prisoner requested, wrote and mailed their mother a card. So, the powers that be at the prison decided to repeat the program for Father’s Day; almost nobody requested or mailed their father a card. Correlation between missing or negative father-child relations and being in prison…? I’d put money on it!! Children thrive in positive families with a loving father and a loving mother, or at least in situations where both a father-figure and mother-figure are involved in their lives. Are there exceptions… of course there are, but why play the odds with your children’s future if you can help it ?!? M~

Posted: Knowledge Creates Power

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• Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day

One of Life's Great Miracles

by Alexander Green

Today I'd like to say a few words about an enormously important group of people.

Pastor John S.C. Abbott said they have "as powerful an influence over the welfare of future generations as all other earthly causes combined."

Historian Will Durant called them nothing less than "the nucleus of civilization."

A Jewish proverb tells us that God created them because He couldn't be everywhere.

I'm talking, of course, about mothers.

Consider yours. Without her, you wouldn't be sitting here. But biology is the least of it, really!!

We would not have survived - not any of us - had we not been deeply loved and cared for in the first years of life.

Your mother is almost certainly your first memory. Yet even before memories, her voice created your first sense of security, her touch your first experience of affection, her constant care and attention the impression that we live in an idyllic world of limitless compassion.

We don't, of course, but isn't it a beautiful way to start?

Your mother was your earliest teacher, your strongest advocate, your first love. And as you grew, so did her sacrifices.

When you got sick, she took care of you. When you got in trouble, she took up for you. When you had some place to go ... she took you.

As one of four boys, I grew up convinced that my mother's mission on earth was to be a cook, maid, nurse, counselor, referee and, of course, chauffer. (Peter DeVries once described a mother as someone whose role is "to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car for ever after.")

In a large household, of course, a mother's work is never really done. Friends, however, would sometimes remind my Mom how fortunate she was to have five strong men around to help out. Hmmm...

I remember the time a neighbor dropped by during the playoffs. "Hey," he said looking at the five of us draped across the furniture, "how come all you guys are in here watching the game and your Mom is out front mowing the lawn?"

"I dunno," I remember saying. "I think she likes it."

How's that for appreciation?

In our home, my Mom ran everything, organized everything, remembered everything and, it's embarrassing to recall, did almost everything that needed doing, too.

To top it off, she made - and still makes - a vegetable soup that is nothing short of spectacular. I don't mean it's tasty. I mean it is ambrosia.

(If you're skeptical that anything truly stunning can be done with vegetable soup, it only means you've never tasted hers. No one who has would ever contest the claim.)

A mother's influence is hard to overstate. In many ways, it is incalculable.

Her love - the strongest, blindest and most exquisite - is neither acquired nor deserved. Nor can it ever be fully acknowledged.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins captures this sentiment beautifully in one of his poems:

The Lanyard
The other day as I was riocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past--
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that's what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And her is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift--not the archaic truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Why am I sharing this?

This weekend you have the opportunity to honor the person whose place no one else can take, the woman to whom you owe your very existence.

And let us remember, your mother may not be the person who biologically delivered you. Your “real mother” may be an adoptive mother, a step-mother, a foster mother, or another female friend, relative or guardian who took that role… and you know who she is. She is your mom.

Perhaps she deserves not a card, a phone call, or a box of chocolates, but an expression of genuine gratitude.

If she is around, cherish her. If she is not, cherish her memory.

Before you were conceived, she wanted you, even if she is your adoptive mother. From the moment she knew you were coming, she loved you. When you came into her life, she was willing to sacrifice everything for you.

Is this not one of life's great miracles?

Carpe Diem, Alex

United States Mother’s Day

Early "Mother's Day" was mostly marked by women's peace groups. A common early activity was the meeting of groups of mothers whose sons had fought or died on opposite sides of the American Civil War. In New York City, Julia Ward Howards led a "Mother's Day" anti-war observance in 1872, which was accompanied by a Mother's Day Proclamation. The observance continued in Boston for about ten years under Howe's personal sponsorship, then died out.

Several years later, a Mother's Day observance on May 13, 1877 was held in Albion, Michigan, over a dispute related to the temperance movement the second Sunday of the month. According to local legend, Albion pioneer, Juliet Calhoun Blakeley, stepped up to complete the sermon of the Rev. Myron Daughterty, who was distraught because an anti-temperance group had forced his son and two other temperance advocates to spend the night in a saloon and become publicly drunk. In the pulpit, Blakeley called on other mothers to join her. Blakeley's two sons, both traveling salesmen, were so moved that they vowed to return each year to pay tribute to her and embarked on a campaign to urge their business contacts to do likewise. At their urging, in the early 1880s, the Methodist Episcopal Church in Albion set aside the second Sunday in May to recognize the special contributions of mothers.

Frank E. Hering, President of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, made the first known public plea for "a national day to honor our mothers" in 1904.

In its present form, Mother's Day was established by Anna Marie Jarvis, following the death of her mother on May 9, 1905; she campaigned to establish Mother's Day as a U.S. national, and later an international, holiday.

Originally the Andrew's Methodist Episcopal Church, the site of the original Mother's Day commemoration, where Anna handed out carnations, the International Mother's Day Shrine is now a National Historic Landmark. From there, the custom caught on—spreading eventually to 46 states. The holiday was declared officially by some states as early as 1912, beginning with West Virginia. On May 8, 1914, the U.S. Congress passed a law designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day and requesting a proclamation. On May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made that proclamation, declaring the first national Mother's Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.

Carnations have come to represent Mother's Day, since they were delivered at one of its first celebrations by its founder. This also started the custom of wearing a carnation on Mother's Day. The founder, Anna Jarvis, chose the carnation because it was the favorite flower of her mother. In part due to the shortage of white carnations, and in part due to the efforts to expand the sales of more types of flowers in Mother's Day, the florists promoted wearing a red carnation if your mother was living, and a white one if was dead; this was tirelessly promoted until it made its way into the popular observations at churches.

In May 2008, the US House of Representatives voted twice on a resolution commemorating Mother's Day, the first one being unanimous so that all congressmen would be on record showing support for Mother's Day.

Happy Mother’s Day~~

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• Happy Father's Day