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30 October, 2007

MY FATHER'S HANDS: MR. PAUL CLEMENTS




My first memories of my father were of how huge his hands were. So big, I could sit in his palm, diaper and all, like a little bird. I could sit there and feel safe and secure. As I grew older, and bigger, I could no longer fit so securely in his palm, but his hands still seemed big and strong. He could lift heavy things with ease. I often looked at those hands while he performed manly tasks. He could fix a bicycle, unclog a drain, or sharpen a kitchen knife for my mother. He was adept at building things, repairing windows, and laying tile. His hands could work wood or fix pipes with ease.

As any boy might, I occasionally transgressed. Then those hands of his would be aimed at my backside. I came to fear them. Not that I didn't deserve the swats, or that they were inflicted with unusual cruelty. He was an old fashioned father, who believed in instant correction for wrongdoing. So, in that fashion, I learned moral and ethical lessons from those hands.

In my teen years, I noticed changes in my own hands. They were becoming larger and bonier, and I often wondered if they would ever become as strong and capable as his. He still had a lot of strength in them, and Mom was always calling on him to open stuck jar lids. Sometimes, though, I noticed there were tasks he could not perform barehanded. His need to resort to a wrench, or to a vise, or to a hammer, to accomplish some task caused me to stop thinking of him as a superman. His hands were beginning to demonstrate his mortality, and I sensed my own, as well.

When I finished Naval service, my fathers' hands changed again. My father hugged me at first sight, then, embarrassed a bit, he stepped back and extended his hand. We shook, and I realized that, at last, my hands were the same size as his. Not quite as strong yet, but close. In later years, we worked together fixing cars, doing yard work, building a house, undertaking renovations. His hands were still strong and capable, but now I saw them as normal mans' hands. He worked outdoors in cold weather, his hands turning red, and never complained. I learned stoicism from those hands in those cold New England winters.

When I married, and had a child of my own, the circle of life began to close in on itself. I held my daughter in my own palm one day, and realized that that was my first impression of my father. I wondered if my daughter would remember me by my hands. I realized how much like my fathers' hands they had become. As I stroked her hair, I wondered how many times my father had used his hands on me in the same fashion, while I slept, unaware. A grandfather by now, age showed in my fathers' hands. More wrinkles, less muscularity, an occasional brown spot. Sometimes, he had to ask me to open a jar, or pick up a heavy object. His hands were becoming weak and bony. An old mans' hands, crossed back and forth with blue veins, standing clearly under loose, thin skin.

Finally, his body began to malfunction. He had to be hospitalized, and it was painful to see his hands pierced by needles and swathed in tape and gauze. Lifting a glass to his lips, his hands would shake. He lacked the old confidence in their power and utility, and moved objects carefully, lest they be spilled. Sometimes they did. At the very end, in a hospital emergency ward, he seemed to have difficulty just lifting those hands to wave "Hi". Thin and bony, they remained motionless most of the time. Early one morning, I was summoned to the hospital to say my final farewell. As I took his lifeless hands in mine, and felt the warmth fading away, I realized how important those hands had been in my own life. The comfort, the safety, the help, and the lessons they had offered. When I saw those hands, folded together across his chest, clutching his prayer beads, I couldn't resist laying my own on top of them, mentally saying, "Thanks, Dad, for lending me a helping hand while I was growing up.”

THE SACRIFICE OF PARENTHOOD: MRS. JANET MIKUL COLLINS





My husband and I recently went to the theatre to see “The Marsh of the Penguins” one of the greatest stories of parental sacrifice that occurs in nature.

The movie is essentially a nature program starring Empero Penguins who make their home in the Antarctica, a solid sheet of ice where temperatures dip to 70 below and it is dark six months out of the year.

As the story begins, the penguins leave their watery home to march 70 miles inland to a place where the ice sheet is thick and a huge ice wall protects them from the worst of the wind. There they spend several days carefully selecting a mate, followed by three weeks of gestating an egg. After the egg is produced, the female transfers the egg to the male so she can go back to the waters to eat enough food to sustain the coming young. Producing an egg has taken up a third of her body weight. The transfer of the egg is a tricky process. If the couple fumbles the egg and it lands on the ice, the egg will freeze in seconds and the breeding season is over for that couple. More experienced couples practice how they will transfer the egg, and do so successfully. The male holds the egg on top of his feet and underneath his down feathers. After the transfer of the egg, the females leave for the 70-mile trek back to the coast and the males are on their own for a good three months during the worst of winter. Throughout the long, cold, dark months the males keep warm through a huge body huddle during which each penguin spends some time in the innermost part of the huddle and some time on the outside of the huddle walking to keep warm. Temperatures reach 70 below zero and the males have been without food for months. When the egg hatches, the male has kept in a separate gullet one small morsel of food to feed his young to sustain it until its mother comes back. The females return full of sustenance for their young and have no trouble identifying their mates among the huge mass of penguins. After the chick is transferred to the female, the male spends some time bonding with his chick and memorizing the sound of its voice before himself returning to the coast. At this point he is on the verge of starvation, having lost half of his body weight with a 70-mile trek to make.

The males and females will feed the chick in relays throughout the coming months, with each taking a turn going to the ocean and each taking a turn staying with and feeding the chick. Then the whole family will march to the shore together, with the fledglings staying ashore until they are ready to claim the ocean as their home.

Penguins exist in other parts of the world, but this particular species has chosen of their own free will this harsh climate and precarious environment. Perhaps it is because of the abundance of food or lack of competition or relative few predators. But having chosen this environment, it is also an act of their own free will that they sacrifice so much for their young.

FREE WILL VS. SACRIFICE: MR. RANDY L. COLLINS




As stated in the Universal Culture of Fatherhood, “Free will provides the foundation upon which the natural condition of Mankind rests. This freedom of will insured his/her individuality and supports his/her ability to find hope in even the direst of circumstances. Thus it can also be said that a major component of “Free Will” must include having the ability to choose. Without this option of choice, “Free Will” cannot exist. Furthermore, having the choice between two negative consequences is no choice either, since it is generally understood that two negatives cancel each other out. Therefore, it may be said that in the final analysis, if the choices that present themselves are only those predetermined by outside circumstance or compromise, not “Free Will,” then you are not engaged in “Free Will,” and you might choose to reexamine your personal interpretation of the Universal Culture of Fatherhood.

“Free Will” also means action. Because you possess it, you as an individual must choose desirable consequences and act deliberately upon your environment to bring about those desired choices into real change. Usually experience is used to buffer action with consequences so that consistency and fairness are steadfast components of Free Will. Deliberate action which purposely restricts the expressions of freedoms of another also restricts and curtails our own ability to express “Free Will.” To insure our own right to express our own will, we must be careful not to deliberately violate the rights of others. To do so sets into motion the Law of Consequences inside the Laws of Nature, which are bound together and must seek balance or justice. The Universal Culture of Fatherhood seeks to guarantee that not only are “all men/women created equal,” but that the lives and pursuits of all men/women are to be respected and valued as equal.

This may pose a dilemma for us as parents. Parents have been entrusted with the responsibility of providing safety, stability and guidance to those who are in their youth and are unaware of the lessons experience has to teach them. Those children are as yet driven by hungers, thirsts and unnamed emotional desires common to the human condition. These states of the human condition are multiple and various and are usually the teachings of tradition and culture, but may only be echoes of the person’s past as well as misleading fears of the future. Roles are assigned at very early ages and the diversity found in nature only confounds and confuses some persons who find themselves miscast in those roles. Some are unfortunate enough to think in terms of stereotypes and wonder all their lives why other types of people don’t know their lines. We must teach ourselves, our young and others that they and we are a collection of unique individuals who make up humankind as a group and that collectively the group is made up of unique individuals. Each individual being is as special and as unique as Alaskan snowflakes. In the Universal Culture of Fatherhood one may begin to understand the depth and complexities involved in interacting as parents, as adults, and as people who are themselves bound by the Law of Consequences and individuality.

To say that in order to fulfill our mandate as parents we must sometimes make the sacrifice of delaying our own gratification as an example to the children in our care would be an understatement. Yet the truth remains that self-sacrifice is a necessary ingredient to parenting. Self-sacrifice becomes of primary importance to us as guiding adults whose influences are repeatedly used in an attempt to reinforce that primary message of self-control. We must begin to accept and try to understand the vast potential for complex and involved communication between us as guardians and those we wish to guide. We must communicate clearly to those we wish to share with. We must confess with humility that we have no crystal ball, nor are we in a perfect world where everything is predictable and without surprise. We must overcome any awkwardness at revealing ourselves to those young people and instead create an opportunity for dialogue, trusting that having done all we are able to do, our young will choose to explore the depth and breadth of their being and go in wonder at the beauty they find. We must seek to instill in them and in ourselves that in many ways we are the captains or our own destiny. And that “a problem is only a lesson in disguise.” That as soon as you discover the answer to the problem, it is yours to do with what you will. Somehow we must try to impart the understanding that the life force which runs through every tangible thing under the sun also runs through us and is our friend. We must convince them to dare to dream of good things, loving things, those things that invite loving kindness and tolerance. Things that promote confidence, trust and a sense of worthwhile purpose.

We must keep talking with them, sharing our insights along the way – never forgetting to encourage dialogue. We must acknowledge that immediate gratification was the rule for us as we began to mature into our physical bodies. It becomes critical to adjusted understanding that we admit to the follies of our youth, and perhaps acknowledge to ourselves that as we matured into adulthood, so did our propensity for immediate gratification. Some of us wanted what we wanted when we wanted it. We must acknowledge to ourselves that allowing the principle of immediate gratification to run amuck and unchallenged was counterproductive in terms of our future hopes and dreams.

HOUSE OF UMOJA, INC. ANNOUNCES “NEXT STEPS” FOR “READING IS RESISTANCE” COMPONENT OF PHILADELPHIA’ S OBSERVANCE OF NATIONAL MILLION FATHER MARCH

CONTACT:   Queen Mother Falaka Fattah President and Chief Executive Officer House of Umoja, Inc. (215) 473-5893 E-Mail:  falakafattah@aol.co...