“All over the world,” came the reply. The other people in the air port wee leaving for distant destinations or arriving at the ends of their journeys. The father and son, though, were just riding this shuttle together, making it exciting, sharing each other’s company.

So many troubles in this country – crime, the murderous soullessness that seems to be taking over the lives of many young people, the lowering of educational standards, the increase in vile obscenities in public, the disappearance of simple civility. So many questions about what to do. Here was a father who cared about spending the day with his son and who had come up with this plan on a Saturday morning.

The answer is so simple: parents who care enough to spend time, and to pay attention and to try their best. It doesn’t cost a cent, yet it is the most valuable thing in the world.

The train picked up speed, and the father pointed something out, and the boy laughed again, and the answer is so simple.
My father still looks remarkably like I remember him when I was growing up: hair full, body trim, face tanned, eyes sharp. What’s different is his gentleness and patience. I had remembered neither as a boy you find ltd, and I wondered which of us had changed.

My son Matthew and I had flown to Arizona for a visit, and his 67-year-old grandfather was tuning up his guitar to play for the boy. “You know ‘Oh, Give Me a Home Where the Buffalo Roam’?” my father asked.

All the while, four-year-old Matthew was bouncing on the couch, furtively strumming the guitar he wasn’t supposed to touch and talking incessantly.

My father and I were once at great odds.  and rebellious teen stuff: shouting matches, my weird friends, clothes and beliefs. I still vividly recall the revelation that finally came to me one day that I was not my father, and that I could stop trying to prove I wasn’t.

When I was a boy, my father wasn’t around much. He worked seven days a week as a milkman. But even at work he was the task-master in absentia. Infractions were added up, and at night he dispensed punishment, though rarely beyond a threatening voice or a scolding finger.

I believed that manhood required that I stand up to him, even if it meant fists. One day some friends and I buried our high school’s parking-lot barriers under the woodpile for the annual home-coming bonfire .