Here's a song for my father who was born in 1914, died in 2003, and loved baseball. I'm sure that my childhood memories of Father's Day had a baseball game on the radio as part of the sound track:
For many years, for Father's Day, I used to bake my father a loaf of Norwegian braided bread and mail it from my home in Washington State to where he lived with my mother in Northern California after he retired. He always expressed appreciation for that bread. My father was confusing to me in the ways he hurt my feelings deeply, undermining my self-esteem throughout his life and at the same time seemed to be proud of me. After my mother died, a first cousin asked him which of his daughters was most like him and he said, "Amanda." I found that startling. Perhaps he had mixed feelings about himself as well as about me. Who knows? It has occurred to me in recent years that my father may have had Asperger's because that is being diagnosed in numerous members of the younger generations of my family. Perhaps my father's father had Asperger's, too.
*
I wish I could remember my father holding me when I was a baby. I'm grateful for this photo of him as a first-time father at age 35. He was often away on business trips. I became used to his absence as a young child and eventually didn't miss him at all when he was gone. I have to remember that he always came home eventually and that the work that took him away from us was what supported us.
