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Hi everyone – thanks SO much for your messages about the song ‘For Fathers Everywhere’ !!!
Too many for me to answer individually, so i will share a few things with you in response to your various (but ultimately, similar – and I believe, universal) thoughts and feelings.
The Hoppen parents (of Lance, Lane and myself) are gone … Lance and I have children (as does our sister Lynda, who even has a GRANDchild!) … it’s the cycle of life, or as Elton put it “The Circle of Life” (in The Lion King).
We all know, as fathers – and mothers, too – that as we go forward with our own children, we come to appreciate our own parents so much more… and, myself at 58, I don’t ever expect that to stop ?
I think we appreciate that largely because we have similar – a bit different in each ‘modern’ timeframe – responsibilities, problems and joys they had when they were raising us. Our revisits to these situations NOW paints a very different picture than it did when we were kids ourselves, doesn’t it?
As Obama said the other day, there’s nothing more fun than being a Dad. To paraphrase him further, he also said basically to check back with him after his girls are teenagers – and that’s exactly where I am ?
My (our) Dad passed in November 2000. He always referred to death (whenever the subject came up, which wasn’t all that often) as ‘a part of life’. Mom passed less than a year later, in Sept 2001. I am grateful that both their passings were not sudden and that we had time to say goodbye, as it were. I think they felt good about their lives.
I certainly hope so, because they were terrific parents and did wonderful things. More wonderful as I get older, actually !!!
They are part of the big Master plan now, whatever that may be. We miss them, I miss them, I wish they could see my kids, come to a show, visit for the holidays etc like old times.
But for the rest of our lives, our parents live on through us. We (hopefully) will live on through our own children.
That circle thing….
PS For those of you who asked for the lyrics, here they are —
What wouldn’t I do to keep ‘em safe and warm
Provide a shelter from any storm
Give them the tools to be secure
Even if I have to bleed … I‘ll do that and more
Here in this world there can be no doubt
What else matters? Nothing can compare
If a man has a child, he knows what I’m on about
I believe this rings true For Fathers Everywhere
With dark days before us, I will seek the light
So I can look em in the eye and say “Its gonna be alright”
There’s no manual … no guarantee
That’s the way it’s always been, my mission, my reason to be…..
For me, in this world there can be no doubt
Nothin’ else matters, nothin’ can compare
When a man has a child, he knows what I’m on about
I believe this rings true For Fathers Everywhere
Wives and mothers, sometime lovers
May think that we don’t get it.
That’s just disheartening talk for Dads who walk the walk
With or without marriage, love’s never to disparage
And if there must be damage, let it be to me….
I’ll give them the tools to be secure
Even if I have to bleed … I‘ll do that and more
Here in this world there can be no doubt
What else matters? Nothing can compare
If a man has a child, he knows what I’m on about
I believe this rings true For Fathers Everywhere
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What a beautiful post. I found Orleans online too late for the “For Fathers Everywhere” song, but I have three children who are all the apple of my eye and my wife’s. I’m 44 myself and still have my own father, although my mother passed on in 1994.
One of the interesting things of having children actually came to me in an epiphany while watching my teenage daughter listen to a modern-day cover of “Dancing In The Moonlight”, and that is the fact that generational relations go both ways. The present and future learn from the past, but the present and future also TEACH the past.
I realized that while I can play the older versions of “Dancing” by Boffalongo and King Harvest to my children, I can’t fully convey the pleasant associations I have from my childhood because that particular world no longer exists and they can’t relate to everything I tell them about what they’d never seen. However, I learn from *them* and from everything in the present world, which is THEIR world. And mine. So in a way, while I can pass some things from my generation to theirs, they are also giving from their generation to mine.
The circle of life is a wonderful thing, it’s mysterious and yet we all strive to understand it. We carry it, and it carries us. And together, we carry on.
