VOLUME 1, CHRONICLE 26, FATHER’S DAY 2024, ABSENT YET PRESENT: Sometimes I write, to paraphrase Maya Angelou, because it’s agony to bear an untold story in the soul or like today, I’m an empty penitent seeking a filling communion, seeking a presence in an absence. Sometime in October 2013 during the MLB playoffs, I called my dad to see if he was watching the game & the double play a middle infielder had turned. The call went unanswered. No call would be answered again as I had lost my dad about a month before. Reality hit as I sent my phone in a flat spin into the couch with a word totally unbecoming a Sunday School teacher, followed by “…now I’ve gotta do the rest of this by myself.” In January of 2011, I lost Tom, my father-in-law. In my dad Bill & Tom, two lamp posts were gone. When I was trying to find myself around the next corner but losing pieces of myself in the rear view mirror, they were there with a broom. When I constructed my own Jericho walls, they were there, often just the two of them, circling the walls for me, with me, blowing the shofar until the walls came down. Two lamp posts that exchanged my arrogance for absolution, two lamp posts that when I used them selfishly, only for support like a Saturday night downtown drunk, offered illumination & the light still glows. Like Mav clutched Goose’s dog tags & asked him to speak while fighting a MiG-28, I clutch Tom’s favorite licorice jelly beans or my Dad’s favorite, the confection laid at his feet in a bag that accompanied him to his final rest, like a Viking warrior to Valhalla, Tootsie Pops. Tom was a realist, an engineer who lived in the black & white world of the slide rule, did crosswords in ink & could create a chicken cacciatore worthy of its Tuscan origins, & he trusted me with Miss Julie. He could loosen up with a tale about how much cat hair is required for a Persian rug or how he kept a 1 iron in his golf bag for safety from storms because even God can’t hit a 1 iron or note that when searching for a lost item, it’s always found in the last place you look or like the attached photo from a lengthy par 5 declare, “we should give ourselves a couple of strokes, no one should have to factor the earth’s curvature into club selection”. He could get his elbows out too, like the 5th tee at Augusta when Arnie came through in ’96, he held his spot by boxing out like he was Bill Russell & saw the King tee it up from the front row. Those same elbows hinged an arm thrown over my shoulder when I needed it most. My dad was an idealist, a poet that relished the tints & tones of the gray life offers. He was unafraid of wandering or wondering or showing passion or compassion as required by his situation. He could make a pen dance on paper or turn a phrase from the pulpit, the one place he exchanged the grays for firm & unbent primaries. I can hear him as cries go out for God & the Bible to be put back in school. He’d scoff & say if we’re doing it right, really love God & our neighbor, our God will be in the heart, then come out in our head & hands in the hallways, no statute required. He also knew most didn’t want to hear that, but like Angelou, he wouldn’t suffer the agony. He was, like he’s been more everyday since he passed, right. The proof is in a soon to be razed school cafeteria with a gym & locker room sitting above, in at least 3 states & a foreign country, boys of different skin & faith & economics that ate & dressed & played with my dad in attendance, that as men still celebrate their differences & the proof is in notes I have from a sermon he delivered as an interim minister in April of ‘62 only 7 miles from 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, a place that met the hate of bigots in September of 1963, denouncing racism to the all white church of which he was a member. He was correct when a shattered left leg begat shattered dreams when an orthopedist said, “you’re done”, & he let me know, though I was done as an athlete, there was far more important work to be done. As always, he was right as when he told me, on a Sunday night long ago, after I had shared with him that on that Sunday morning, I shot what is still my best round of golf ever, that while my 18 was good, on Sunday mornings, I was better off seated in the last pew than standing on the first tee & he was correct when he said that any degree of crisis will divide those around you into keepers & quitters. Find the keepers. Be a keeper. Bill & Tom are in my boys, as I watch them bossa nova on the dance floor of fatherhood & newlywed in the black & white & gray or how they cared for the grandmothers their granddads left behind. I wish they were here to enjoy their great-granddaughters but they are present in their absence. In quiet determination or vocal resolve. In eyes or a word or an action that says “you’re telling me no, but I don’t agree”. I’ve learned in the agony of the pen  & the penance of the soul & the clutching of a rosary of jelly beans & Tootsie Pops, I’ve confirmed why I’m here…I’m here in the searching, the finding, the keeping & quitting & the tearing & mending to be a father & grandfather that’ll make Tom & Bill’s present offspring want to clutch a Milky Way bar when I am absent…