Here’s a picture of our last Monday business lunch together from June 2016.    I didn’t know at the time it was the last one.  Father’s Day is this Sunday and that reality has been lurking at the side of my mind all week.  I’m not even that sentimental about Hallmark created events but it does cause me to pause to consider the impact of a father on a daughter’s life.  Last year I bought my Dad three different Father’s Day cards because I kept misplacing my collection.  I never delivered one to him in 2016.  He didn’t seem to mind.  When I told him what I done, he said, “Well, it looks like we are set for the next three years.”  I’m glad I had the kind of Dad that I wanted to send a card to on Father’s Day.  I never needed to send him a card for him to know that he mattered to me.

Now before I get too wrapped up in sentimental cheese cloth I must also say, my Dad was opinionated, bossy, quick tempered and could be quite impatient with me.  Over the years of my youth my Dad and I had a hard time connecting to each other.  I was the free-spirited daughter who read Langston Hughes poetry and copied the poems into my journals.  I was a kid with Attention Deficit issues who could not for the life of me remember to hang up a wet towel, close a cupboard door, or do my math homework in any semblance of order.  My Dad taught me how to number put my math homework on notebook paper in a way which my teacher could read.

I will not offer any moral lessons or try to draw a conclusion from today’s post.  However, I will borrow this phrase from Richard Paul Evans; we all live with the assumption of a tomorrow.  We assume life will go along the way we anticipate and plan.

“The assumption of time is one of humanity’s greatest follies. We tell ourselves that there’s always tomorrow, when we can no more predict tomorrow than we can the weather. Procrastination is the thief of dreams.” (Alan Christoffersen’s Diary) The Walk

One of my resolutions following this almost year of grief is to no longer put off necessary conversations and relationships.  It calls upon me to move beyond my fears and to ask the harder question, new accountability and more truth telling than I am comfortable with on a daily basis.  I’ll be sending out a Father’s Day card to one of my favorite men in the world, my father-in-law.  Don’t tell him though.  He hates mushy stuff.