Dear Son,
I’ve spent the last fifty years pruning your family tree and it has been interesting. I say your tree, because I researched your mother’s ancestry, as well. Our family has survived centuries of civil wars in Europe and America, through what Charles Dickens called the worst of times and best of times. Or was it “the best of times, it was the worst of times?” Our family story is the story of humankind.
In the face of political and religious persecution, enslavement and genocide, our ancestors survived the storm. Not always the innocent victim, they were also capable of being the vicious transgressor. There are places in time when one branch of our family butchered another branch, and I will leave at that. I bound up my research into two volumes: My Father’s Tree and Whit’s End, The Anthology. They’re up on the shelf in the den.
It gets dark here at night in the Northwoods of Wisconsin and the universe is vast. Stars unfold in the night sky and reveal the eternal heaven that mankind seeks in our journey on Earth. I feel small beneath the canopy of constellations, I am a dust particle filled with awe and wonder. When we lived in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains in Montana I studied the layers of sedimentary rock laid down over the course of billions of years. Our time on this planet is but a moment in the eons: A nanosecond, a milli-micro nanosecond. No. Using SI (the International System of Units, 1960) I am but a yotta micro nanosecond. Google it.
The Crow Chief, Crowfoot, once observed: “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of the buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset.” My name is lost in the phone books of life, my image is a photon in a vacuous cosmos. “A butterfly flits across the meadow and is gone.” If you are looking for a Higgs Boson particle, I have been hiding it in my soul for some time now. I will give it to you.
And yet, my life has purpose and meaning. Each of us leaves a footprint, a shadow on the wall of life, a vapor of gas, if nothing more than a good fart. We have impact through the life that we live and the family we become. I believe we have a greater understanding of who we are if we understand those who came before us and the efforts that they made on their journey thru our universe.
I have come to appreciate our forefather’s struggles for survival and a better life and I have come to forgive them, if the manner in which they succeeded, came at a cost to others: Those who owned slaves and those who broke the bondage of slavery through violence, those who killed in the name of God and those who killed God, those who sought new lands and those who took their lands from others whether in Prussia, Ireland or our New World. From the Norman conquerors and Viking warriors to the peasant Irish farmer and the Welsh King, I find that each generation has a story to tell and I will listen and learn. I will gather their stories and leave them for future generations to say, “Nah. That didn’t really happen. Did it?”
Love, Dad
P.S. The internet is broken here again. When can you come home and fix it?