Father
(page 4)
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
As we were baptized, so we profess our belief. As we profess our belief, so also we offer praise. As then baptism has been given us by the Savior, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, so, in accordance with our baptism, we make the confession of the creed, and our doxology in accordance with our creed.
I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like — when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that's terrorism, too.
A father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he meant to be.
You hear about people your whole life, 'So-and-so has cancer', and you're like, 'Wow, that's too bad', and then most people tend to go about their day. But when someone tells you that it's your father or it's your family, that doesn't tend to go away.
You know, my parents have always been incredibly supportive. I'm an only child, so we're very close. There's just the three of us. They're exceptional parents but also great friends. My father was able to take his hobby, photography, and turn it into a beautiful career. So when they saw how much I loved acting, they were 100 percent behind me.
I remember saying goodbye to my father the night he left to join the Navy. He didn't have to. He was older than other servicemen and had a family to support but he wanted to be a part of the fight against fascism, not just make movies about it. I admired this about him.
My father raised us to step toward trouble rather than to step away from it.
My father, a bakery-truck driver, was the epitome of the work ethic that probably kept me knocking out columns six days a week for a rough total of 12,600 over 50 years.
The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.
Peter Fleming was a famous English traveler, explorer and adventurer, whose non-fiction books were hugely successful. My father owned signed copies of all of them — he and Peter Fleming had become acquainted over some detail of set design at the Korda film studio in Shepperton — and I had read each of them with breathless adolescent excitement.
My parents are the last of the middle class. My father worked for the government designing sea mines. My mother was a substitute teacher. Together, they worked really only until they were sixty.
I remember seeing my father shaving my mother's head in the bathroom after her chemo treatments; It was so traumatizing.
I just got hooked on the radio, the voice of it all. It was my connection to metropolitan America, if you will. Sports, in particularly baseball then 'cause of its rich sediment of numbers, was one of the first things a young person could peg up with adults on — that is, you could know as much about Jimmy Fox as your father did.
