I liked your bit about evolution and your dad being better to you than his was to him — I can relate.

My Dad was pretty darn good, albeit fairly absent except for vacation and holidays. I can look back with a twinge of bitterness at all the football games and track meets he missed, or be grateful that I wasn’t packed off to boarding school at age 10 after his mother died — riding the train alone from California to the east coast…

Is he the grandfather to my boys that I wished they had? Someone interested and engaged in their lives? We lived next door to him for several years after he retired -so it would have been pretty easy — but that wasn’t going to happen. But, he made more of an impact on my boys than his own father did on my brother and me.

Instead of mourning the man and the relationships that never were, I choose to celebrate someone who rose above his own experiences to be a better man than his father.