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Health & Fitness

Things My Dad Is Still Teaching Me

A personal essay in anticipation of my Dad's 84th birthday.

My Dad is a Leap Year baby, born Feb. 29, 1928. It means in just a few weeks, he'll be 84, finally legal in every state in the Union, as I've reminded him! Once I invited him to speak at a retreat held for the church I serve, the Emmaus Church of Northfield. We met at the Assisi Heights Retreat Center in Rochester, MN, a convent and retirement home to some of the order’s oldest nuns. We were housed in those tiny rooms afforded in such places, beds the size of a postage stamp, guaranteed to have a tall man tossing and turning, next to no sleep to be had.  When he stood to give his morning talk the next day he ripped off William Wordsworth’s poem, Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room, and from memory, no less:

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

It’s what my father had come to know himself, the freedom of needing little, what the Apostle Paul considered to be contentment in the “whatever.”  His Dad, my Grandpa Glen, had twin credos that had given shape to a measure of all that, ones that often surface when we’re together as a family even yet.  He always would say,

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“Money in circulation makes for good times.”  And,

“If you don’t have any money, you just need to learn to enjoy people who do.”

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The first, of course, is easier to live by than the second, while the second makes the first all the more possible :).  And while we joke about it--and find no end to tales of my dad's brilliant, glad-handing ways--the word I have most come to associate with him is “generous.”  His has been a life of generous collegiality, generous scholarship, generous churchmanship, generous friendship, generous gamesmanship, generous fatherhood—a life lived in open-handed response to his always generous God.  I guess if you’re looking for a legacy, that one tain’t bad...  

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