My father had a birthday last week and I spoke to him by telephone while lazing on a sandy beach along the Sea of Cortez in Sonora, Mexico.   He turned 87 that day and he still lives with his wife in the house that I grew up in. 

          Persistence.  I remember when the house was built.  It was finished in the late summer between the fifth and sixth grade.   By the time we moved in, school had already begun.  And the day we moved out, my brother and sister and I, all rode our bicycles in a pack over to the new house.  I remember a warm day in the Fall and sporatic and spontaneous races along the way, expressions of joy combined with a sense of connection and purpose.

          If I was going into the sixth grade, then it had to be 1963.  The assignation of John F. Kennedy was not far off.  No one could have known of the tumultuous times ahead.  But that is not what I came to write about.   Today I want to write about persistence. 

           Persistence is not something that even exists in isolation.  It has to be linked to an object.    There has to be a direction for all that continuing effort, a goal.  Looking at my father at 87, it seems as if he somehow knew which goal to aim for.  And even now with his knarled arthritic hands, he is still holding onto the same house that we happily bicycled towards that day in the sun long ago.  Married to the same woman after 62 years.         

          I am a fortunate son to still be able to return to that house, the home of my childhood.  And I can do that today, because in 1963 my parents had a shared purpose.  In my memory it was commemorated by speaking about it from time to time with us, the kids.  Not a vow to stay in the house forever and never leave, come hell or high water.  Nothing so dramatic.  It was simply a vision to pay the house off.  To own it free and clear so that no bank or financial institution could ever take it away from them, or from us.  It was their home and they had a dream that in some fashion, we all bought into.  It makes a good memory, and looking back I can see that having that shared goal kept them together and on a shared path, through all kinds of weather.

          They choose well.  It was a worthy goal, one they could share and one that still served them as a milestone, long after its attainment.  Perhaps that is a key to the value of persistent effort;  having the proper goal.  It has to big enough to keep ones attention and to act as a useful guide.  And it should  even be bigger than just the subjective view of the holder.  It should be big enough to withstand and hold the objective views of the other significant people in our lives.  The ones we might one day turn to for support along the way.  

Posted by Robert William Case on May 13, 2009.

Label:  Persistence and Challenging Times


     

 

           

If Icarus lived, then there is alot more story to tell.  And not just the boy's story, but the father's as well.  In the original myth Daedalus is a tragic figure, an inventor of wings who lacks the ability to save his own creations.  But even so, he was still the one with the imagination, the creativity and the resolve to build the wings. And building wings was no small feat. It had to take a tremendous amount of time and energy and vision.  It had to be his life’s work.  And if Icarus survived, then it must be time for Daedalus to come out of the shadows.     

 

The point of today’s blog is to recognize that achievement and restore Daedalus to his rightful position as the first person to fly, and honor his accomplishment. The wings were a masterpiece and he was ahead of the Wright brothers by centuries.  Maya Angelou got it right when she said,  “ We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit to the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”  

 

 That is at least one meaning for the title of the book, Daedalus Rising. The father of the boy with wings finally gets the recognition he deserves for the invention and for the flight. To accomplish all this, he  must have had a vision that fueled his imagination, one that he followed for years for his moment in the sun.  Something that sustained him empowering from the inside, when all else fell away.  It was a journey that he traveled one small step after another, until he could fly on the wings of his own creation, the hero of his own story and a man in full.  And whether or not Icarus remained the eternal youth, the puer boy, or develops into the hero of his own story, is for the next book to consider. 

Posted by Robert William Case on February 1, 2009

 
Label:  Life as Art