What do you do if your dad is a music legend who died when you were two and your childhood home has been given a national historic designation? If you're Ravi Coltrane, son of sax genius John, you just chill and blow.
RC, a constant touring presence, is also getting ready for the spring release of his first cd for Blue Note records ... staying well within the jazz family, but going where his father never did — at least label-wise.
Like father
Like son
Hope and fathers are entwined in below-ground news. From Chile comes the good word that one of the miners buried underground is a new father. Naturally, he named his baby daughter Esperanza (Hope). And notice arrives — that brings a smile to Greek tourism officials — that an elaborate underground tomb more likely contains the remains of Alexander the Great's Pop, the Macedonian military master Phillip II, rather than feeble half-bro Phillip III.
A perfect father-daughter story was mostly ruined last Friday. Gordon Wood and daughter Amy, both college professors and historians were also finalists in the history category of the 2009 The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.
Wood the elder, a history professor at Brown, was nominated for his study of the turbulent first years of America, Empire of Liberty
Alas, neither Wood were able to outpoll winner Kevin Starr, who writes of the glories of California (an inside job LA Times?) during glory years 1950 to 1963 in Golden Dreams
For the final coda to this year's U.S. presidents' day we have the sad story of Abe and the Thomases Lincoln.
POTUS 16 struggled with his father, Thomas, a single frontier parent for many years, upset over discipline and the elder's lack of education. (This sounds vaguely like Thing 2 telling me I don't know anything about her seventh grade math assignments, which, perhaps, maybe means I might be a presidential father?) Their divisions grew so great that as Thomas called for his son to his deathbed, the man 10 years from his presidency declined to make the 80-mile trip — not even making it after his father's passing mdash; believing, "If we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant."
Still, there was some connection made by father to son as the president named his youngest son Thomas (with his father above). In a parenting style that doesn't need a forensic psychiatrist to explain, "Tad" (nicknamed for looking like a tadpole as a newborn) was allowed to grow in a cocoon of almost no discpline. He ran wild in the White House and died at age 18, about seven years after his father's assassination.
What were we celebrating again?
Arbitrarily grabbing from the news does make one wonder if boys and girls think about their fathers the same way?
There is the essay of remembrance found in the Toronto Globe and Mail that suggests, "a man can never fully understand or appreciate his father until he has become one himself." Message received, a boy will always question dad but eventually learn from him.
But daughters think differently. They forgive. Particularly when they get to go to a party if you consider the situation of Ireland Baldwin, 13 and target of a father's telephonic rage [Earlier: Those Who Can't, Write], stepping out with dad at the SAG awards, apparently forgiving his insults and temper for the chance to go to a party looking like a grown-up princess.
Girls can also very easily forget as evidenced by the dreams of her father that Sonja Karadzic has. SK's father is Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Serbian nationalists who massacred Bosnians as the former Yugoslavia unravelled and burned in the 1990s. According to her daughter, dad had nothing to do with war crimes, it was U.S. president Bill Clinton who should be on trial in Geneva for the war crimes of which her father is accused. She was there. She knows her dad. She doesn't understand why nobody believes her about his innocence.
Imagine the party Radovan threw or will be willing to throw for Sonja.
One father in the Corono (Calif.) PTA, a past president, thinks his daughter gives him adoring looks when he shows up at school as part of his duties. Maybe she does: she is, after all, still in elementary school ....
It seems more likely though, that the adoring look is him seeing what he wants as he mixes the business of being in his daughter's life and the pleasure. The more likely scenario between father and child is found with young Nathan Upfold. The South African 4-year-old works with his hypnotist father and grandfather as part of their show. Dad thinks he has everything under control and his son just wants to perform. The son believes he has the power to produce extra candy from pops and leave school at midday. And he does.
Face it. The kids are in control no matter what people from outside may think they see. The U.S. president-elect, Barack Obama, will soon have the ideal dad situation: ultimate authority and getting to work from home. Most likely he will find, as have other First SAHDs, that while everyone says they want the perfect stay at home dad situation ... the reality of that perfection is pretty much as Teddy Roosevelt said of first daughter Alice, "I can either run the country or control Alice, not both." He chose the to run the country, because he actually had a chance to do that.
Once again this week we will see how history is passed from father to son. Forty years ago Mayor Richard J. Daley — the political poster child for this week's objet d'eBay — may truly have been good for Chicago, but as mayor of the city where the Democratic party held their national convention, his belief in the heavy hand of police reaction to political protest led to riots, variously ascribed to unruly kids and the police. [Earlier: Dad's Derailed Dreams]
This week, son Richard M. Daley, the current Chicago mayor who learned important lessons in political power from dad and may now break his record for length of service, will also be prominent at his party's convention in Denver along with having the ear of party presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Politics, like every business, can be a family business, but is best run when the child learns from the father's wins and losses. Richard J. went from power broker to political goat; son Richard M. has avoided the traps that cost his father, but instead learned how to consolidate power and has gone from local goat when he lost the 1983 mayoral election to national power broker.
Once again, 40 years later, a Daley has his critics, but probably, generally, really is "good for Chicago."
It would be nice one day to overhear Thing 1 or 2 defending their father's name. In theory.
In fact, it would have to be because they were upset that something bad had been said about the sirer ... and that, of course, also reflects on them. So, in defending me, they'd be defending their own honor. But, still, without the circumstances, it would be nice.
So, it is nice and unfortunate at the same time that Roseanne Cash feels it necessary to say father John would not necessarily be endorsing a candidate, just because someone who never knew him said so. And it is a bit odd that Franklin Graham, rather than defend his own anti-Muslim views by saying he was just following in the anti-semitic mutterings of his dad Billy, instead has to say the Reverend Billy was never dressed down by Bob Jones (father of Bob Jones III who is apparently anti-Mormon) as he is in a just-released hagiographic pic..
One occasion where it seems nice, but not a problem, is when the name calling isn't that bad a name. For example, Robert Schlesinger seems almost giddy in reporting on having someone call his father, historian Arthur Schlesinger, a spook and even a technical delinquent in the eyes of his draft board.
Maybe the important thing is that even when it is insulting, at least the bad chatter gets the children thinking about their pop?
The Daily Mail offers an extraordinary lede to its roundup of current events in the life of Formula One Racing boss Max Mosley. Geoffrey Levy's article begins by explaining that the favored son of Nazi era-relic Oswald Mosley, would be now simply a standup comics punchline, merely a "foolish and rather depraved man" — he is on tape performing some Nazi-costumed S and a bit of M with prostitutes — if it weren't for his father's legacy.
Quite a legacy he now leaves for sons Alexander, 37, and Patrick, 35, and perhaps grandchildren as well.
Wouldn't the world be richer, but the news less entertaining if there was a law — or commonsense just ruled — and every dad had to ask a simple question and then defend his answer before doing anything: what will it mean for my kids?
Fathers need to be fathers. Nicely phrased by U.S. Prez candidate Barack Obama addressing a slightly different problem than Mosley's (and quoted by the Boston Herald's Joe Fitzgerald in a piece on "the daddy issue"): “We have too many children in poverty in this country and don’t tell me it doesn’t have a little to do with the fact that we got too many daddies not acting like daddies. Don’t think that fatherhood ends at conception. "
Daddies acting like daddies. You would think it would already be an evolutionary and genetic mandate, something like breathing in order for the species to survive.
When Valentine's Day — a holiday honoring a single man who thought soldiers should marry, along with other stories — is a dad's day it is almost always indirectly.
But there are exceptions Just ask Russell Enste, who will formally adopt his daughter today in Union County, N.C. The 43-year-old cried when the 21-year-old daughter of the woman he was dating asked him to be her father.
Except for Mr. Enste, most other dads should hope to receive happiness from the smiles of significant others — Thing 1 has new perfume and Thing 2 a heart-themed wrist bangle — and be prepared to sit quietly and appreciatively and without rustling through a date movie along the lines of "Definitely Maybe," a made-for-tv movie filling big screens for a couple weeks about a single dad and the precocious daughter of his divorce who wants to find out about herself by making him find true love.
Or you can always pretend this is a day about atrocities and see how much love that gets you.
It has been Pakistan's generational Groundhog Day (the film, not the flim-flam/news-filler). Benazir Bhutto was assassinated and the doctor on duty was the son of the doctor who was given charge 56 yeas ago when Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was shot.
Father and son were both unsuccessful and the country's turmoil was kept roiling. Dr. Mussadiq Khan (neither he nor his father directly related to the assassinated PM) offered prayers that neither of his two doctor sons faced the same, "God forbid it doesn't happen to them."
Was it just a fated matter of like father like daughter?
Benazir Bhutto was assassinated as she campaigned for the Pakistani presidency. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was Pakistan's first popularly elected leader. He was arrested, tried and executed following a military coup.
To her grave she takes the answer to the question of why she returned from a life of relative ease to a country where many, perhaps millions revered her and perhaps an equal number loathed her. And where the people in power were keen on keeping it for themselves and away from her.
In a past BBC interview, Bhutto tried explaining why she would return. It was, of course, because of her father: "His blood runs in my veins and his presence is always around me."
In the assassination's aftermath, the BBC interviewed a friend, Victoria Scofield, who has known her since their time together at Oxford who said the despite the dangers, Bhutto felt compelled "to carry on the work begun by her father," and that ""as with her father, she has left her own legacy, her own stamp."
Sergei's dad thought sputnik was a "hollowed, polished ball with four whiskers of antennas. ... a scientific amusement."
Pops, of course, was Nikita Kruschev, the shoe-banging proponent of "godless communisim," who was prime minister of the Soviet Union when they beat the U.S. into space by launching a satellite, as well as a temporary push by America to improve the science and mathematical education of its students.
The younger Kruschev, who also gives bent to the position that his father was an even tempered man "[who] didn't like to raise his voice," is currently touring and lecturing as part of the 50th anniversary of the Oct. 4, 1957, launch.
Of course, his getting paid to talk about something not that important to him at the time is like living off dad's history by going on and on about your father's Oldsmobile. A phrase which, in General Motors' negative ad campaign for its cars — this isn't your father's Oldsmobile — still lives on as a very popular phrase and the only think keeping alive an extinct car line.
... Which, I guess, brings us back around to the Soviet Union. A giant bureaucracy that imploded and is no more ... which might be a case study for the genius's at GM to consider before they again tries to slight dads and their cars. Or, perhaps, what Mr. Kruschev should really be helping to explain to us?
WHY the Mother's Day brunch, but nothing equally iconic for dads?
Barbecue? Letting him out for a non-complained-about round of golf? A tie? Not reminding him of the "honey-do" list? A bottle of scotch? Freud never got the answer on woman. Maybe his time would have been better served discovering "what do dad's want?"
Maybe the happiest Father's Day would be one free from worry. As if .... There is the romantic worrier archtyped by Rogers and Hammerstein in Carousel's "My Boy Bill," and there's the bigger worry — for dads of girls, at least — of not being able to communicate, to losing your daughter and to a new generation of worries from your own "madonna."
HFD.
