Happy Father's Day!

photo: Don Quixote by Honoré Daumier.

Happy Father's day, Rice Daddies!

Here's to fatherhood, and how it changes every frakking day.

Rabbit Dragon and Pony Princess are both getting so much older. The school year is over, didn't it just start?

Today at the hardware store we got Rabbit Dragon his first set of house keys. A season ago, house keys had never come to mind. But now we go on family bike rides, and he's always the first to reach home, doing the pee-pee dance while waiting for the lumbering parents and the kid sister to finally pull in and toss over the keys.

It feels so ad hoc, discovering these sort of important decisions on the fly as situations come up. What's next, the Talk? No, no, let me stay in denial a little longer, the kids will always stay kids, yep.

At the kids' first music recital this year (another Rice Daddy rite of passage?) a pair of teenage girls played and sang Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide":

"Time makes you bolder / Even children get older / I'm getting older too."

Maybe I'm just feeling old and creaky this particular weekend, maybe its that the big four-oh is looming. So fellow Rice Daddies, on this Father's day I share a couple of riffs on not going gentle into that good night:

Days With My Father is a beautiful photo journal of Phillip Toledano's father in their last days together. It's really moving, and I've kept it on my browser for over a month to make sure I didn't forget to share it this weekend.

Remember the Geri Chair, is quite a different story, a (true?) tale about a stubborn old Spanish aristocrat, freedom, and a hooker.

When my number is up, I would feel blessed to be remembered fondly like Toledano's dad, but I'd settle for a good story like the Spaniard's.

Happy father's day, all, and many more!