A day to be proud - and to remember
Happy Father’s Day!
Each and every one of us who is striving to be a good role model for our children deserve society’s appreciation — not just one day a year, but every day.
Truly, raising children up right — with a mixture of discipline and devotion — is the most important business we have as citizens.
My own fathers have long since passed away, and yes I did say “fathers.” My biological father wasn’t very good at the rest of being a parent, and after my mother divorced him when I was about 5 years old, he quickly vanished from my and my brother’s life. Fortunately, my mother met and married the man whose last name I adopted, Carmen Miele, and he more than made up for the absence of my birth father.
Carmen was a simple and honorable man who insisted on enjoying life to the fullest, and it was from him that I Iearned to enjoy the “manly” arts of football, baseball, boxing and fishing. I suspect I learned much more from this humble man as well, but it’s been 40 years this September since we lost him, and I admit that as I approach my 60th birthday it’s harder and harder to key in on specific memories of what made Carmen a great man, but I will never forget his smile, nor how proud he was to be my dad.
I’ve probably told the story before of how just a few years after he and my mom were married, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but suffice it to say that we were only blessed with five happy years together before he was crippled and then hospitalizedfor the last 10 years of his life.
Oddly enough, I probably learned more from my dad after he was hospitalized than in those happier years we shared. It was there that his smile and his laughter became famous among the nurses at several VA hospitals. Bound to a wheelchair and later to his bed, my father nevertheless enjoyed life to the fullest, never missed a chance to flirt with any woman who wandered by, and spelled out the word L-O-V-E on his alphabet board whenever he saw me or my mom.
His was not an easy life, but he taught me by his example more than I learned from anyone in a classroom or from a textbook about how to stand upright and be decent, honorable and kind.
I have tried to use some of those lessons in raising my own three children, and the results have been universally positive. Carmen and my mother, Lorraine, were both deeply loving people who lived hard lives and yet never gave up on the fundamental goodness of life. Although I don’t talk about them often with my children, their spirit is never far from us. I’d say that Carmen represented the love of life, and Lorraine represented the love of learning, and both of those traits are deeply ingrained in my three children.
Today, I will be fortunate to be surrounded by my father’s grandchildren, the ones he never got to meet, but who would have made him unbelievably proud — his namesake Carmen, the University of Montana sophomore who makes calculus look easy; Meredith, the Glacier High School sophomore who appears to be intent on making her brother Carmen look like a slacker; and Huzhao, my 4-year-old who loves Snoopy, Beethoven, Confucius, Jesus and Woody Woodpecker (not necessarily in that order).
With my wife Yuzhao at my side, I am doing my best to make a difference in the world — not by politics or polemics, but by sending our own children forward into the future with the comfort and knowledge that they were loved completely, have been given every opportunity to succeed in an uncertain world, and that my prayers will follow them wherever they go.
God bless them.
Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake. If you don’t like his opinion, stop by the office and he will gladly refund your two cents. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com