Another disconnect, and Father’s Rights

Off the Editor’s Spike by Darryl Wilkinson

It seems everything we know about the shootings at Conception this week reveals a story of disconnected facts. Why… why… why? And here’s another disconnect: a Gallatin funeral home is handling the arrangements for Lloyd Jeffress, the 71-year-old gunman who killed two Benedictine monks before killing himself.

Evidently, Jeffress purchased a funeral plan some time ago when the funeral home here operated as Hope Funeral Home. As far as is known, there is no other connection. David McWilliams, who now owns and operates the funeral home, was away taking care of the arrangements for the cremation at the time of this writing. So, the place of burial is not yet known.

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Whenever I can get a young man’s serious attention, I try to point out that anybody with the right bodily functions can be a parent. That’s biological. There’s no license to become a father, no standard other than puberty, and, too often, no training or really any way to gain experience beforehand. And yet, some men get it right — so many, in fact, that Father’s Day is a holiday observed primarily in America and Canada this Sunday.

God Himself was the first to use the word “Father” (Genesis 2:24). The Greek word used in the New Testament translates “Father” to mean nourisher, protector and upholder.

Sonora Louise Dodd understood the full meaning of the word. She was a dedicated daughter, one of six siblings, who wanted the world to know how proud that family was of William Jackson Smart who had served as both mother and father to them when their mother died 21 years before 1909 — when a Spokane, Wash., city council adopted the nation’s first Father’s Day resolution.

I suspect, however, that many men go to their graves wondering, as a father, how they measured up regardless of the circumstances, good or bad. It seems the job is never quite done …nor do we want it to be. Perhaps that is a gift, too, a small glimpse of what “eternity” really means.

Writers better than this little newspaper editor have written great things about fathers. I have saved a Paul Harvey column, printed by the Los Angeles Times in 1976, that means as much to me as the Bible scripture. It describes my own dad, and the type of father I want to be. I know that when it comes to parents (and parents-in-law), I’ve been blessed.

I also believe fathers have a Bill of Rights. It is foolish to think the following list is conclusive, but it does briefly hit upon some things most fathers would propose as inalienable rights. And I would welcome your suggestions and additions:

1. Discipline should be administered as outlined in scripture, early in childhood, consistently and on the spot as it is needed …not sometime after a father returns home from work.

2. No father should have to pretend to know everything about throwing a curve ball, algebra problems, repairing a vehicle, fighting bullies while turning the other cheek, choosing insurance, taking care of babies or figuring out junior high girls or taking out high school girls or even rating the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders on a scale of 1-to-10. Rather, knowing a little bit about most of these things should suffice.

3. No father should ever be required to divide perfectly the last piece of cake between two or more of his children.

4. No father should have to worry about clothing that’s out of style or the shiny trousers he wears as he marches off to work each day, hoping that someday they’ll understand there’s little difference between shiny trousers and knights in shining armor and knowing someday it will be their turn.

5. Fathers have the right to be wrong, thinking there isn’t any man good enough to marry his daughter. Then, after she finds that special someone after all, fathers have the right to be impatient about getting grandchildren… already sure that his grandchildren are going to be just so much better than anybody else’s.

6. Fathers should have at least 5 minutes of absolute privacy and quiet per day — in the bathroom, before work, in the garage, after work or whenever. And he gets to choose which.

7. Fathers should never be scolded for confirming that the TV remote is operational at any given moment or at any given interval. Someday someone somewhere will actually be the first to watch over 20 shows simultaneously, and every father has the right to try to become the first.

8. A father has a right to growl when he feels good because he is expected to laugh very loud when he’s scared half to death.

9. Fathers have a right to hate insurance companies. He spends his entire adulthood betting against them, knowing the odds against who’s going to live the longest, and he keeps right on betting even as the odds get higher and higher. And one day he loses.

10. Fathers are permitted to hug their sons and daughters, no matter what age, whenever he deems it appropriate, or even to kiss them. Nor shall it be mandatory that a father keep a dry eye at all times, especially when he begins to understand, sadly, how he’s lost nearly all of his children to adulthood.