My dad, my son, and my grandson!

It has been way too long since my last post!  There are many reasons, but the biggest is really something quite wonderful.  I have new lenses in both eyes, and this has restored the fabulous long distance vision of my youth.  I’ve been tempted to say “…it was just cataract surgery”, but that would not be accurate.  It was an example of the many miracles of modern medical science.

There was, however, a price to be paid.  For more than three months–from the time of the surgery in my first eye, until I finally received a new set of prescription progressive glasses–there was constant strain in looking from computer screen, to paper pages, to people and back again.  The weariness never seemed to go away, and it was almost more than I could do to keep pace with the essential responsibilities of my day job.  So, I haven’t been blogging.

For what feels like my first post ever, I’ve decided to reflect just a little about fathers, and especially about my own dad.  This is an ‘edublog’, but I believe it’s imperative never to lose sight of the reality that education is supposed to be about far more than school!  When it comes to learning, families matter on many levels.

We’ll celebrate Father’s Day tomorrow in Canada.  I’m the proud father of two adult children.  Our daughter Anjali made me proud in a fresh way this week, as she flew from Vancouver to London, en route to a three month stint as a volunteer nurse on the ‘Africa Mercy‘, a hospital ship currently docked in Freetown, Sierra Leone.  This coming Tuesday, my son Aaron will be going out of his way to visit my dad, who lives 3000 km away from Aaron’s home here on Vancover Island.  That makes me proud, too.

We don’t choose our parents, but I am blessed to have a truly wonderful father.  My dad was a minister who went to his first church two weeks before my birth.  He has always modeled authenticity and integrity, living through the week what he preached on Sunday.  I have learned much of incalculable value from my dad’s example.

As  a boy, I learned much about our world from his answers to my questions.  On the verge of my own 60th birthday, there are still so many things I know because “that’s what my dad said when I was a boy.”  He was a veritable fountain of knowledge–about history, about how things like electric motors work, about how crops grow, about the reasons for seasons, and about countless other stuff.

Dad was always there for me, and I knew that, whether I wanted him to be there or not.  He never imposed himself on me, but I could always count on him to be there.  He was even there when I attended boarding school a thousand miles from him and our home in Calcutta, as I did for 10 years from the age of 7.  Without fail, dad wrote me a letter every single week that we were apart.  He wrote individual letters to each of his four children!

I could go on for a long time and never say it all.  Suffice it to say that my dad deserves to be honored, and I’m glad Father’s Day has brought this into focus again.  Here’s a video that I put together on the occasion of Dad’s 80th birthday in  2008.  I made the video with exerts from Dad’s own 8mm cinematography between 1952 and 1972–in Southern Ontario, in rural West Bengal, and in the Himalayan foothills.  The focus is sometimes pretty soft, but the film helps to keep the memories bright and warm.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.  And thanks for being who you are.  I could never have asked for anything more!