Fathers that wear rags

Fathers that wear rags

  Do make their children blind,

But fathers that bear bags

  Shall see their children kind.

Fortune, that arrant whore,

  Ne'er turns the key to the poor.

~~ from Shakespeare's King Lear, Act II, Scene IV

we're not all Jenny Zhang's parents, but

"[My father] sure as hell was not jumping with joy and support when I said I wanted to be a writer. My mother cried for weeks and threatened to tell Stanford I was a convicted criminal so they would revoke my admission if I didn’t promise that I would not try to be a writer. I didn’t promise and my mother never made good on hers. They were scared for me. . ."

~~from "They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don't Exist" by Jenny Zhang

james baldwin

In contemporary literature, we dove into James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"; I couldn't find the perfect snippet of video to share with students, so this one had to suffice. His expressed thoughts on his father are interesting: "He was. . .  rigid. . . this is, in effect, what killed him. There was something in him that could not bend. He could only be broken."

Perhaps the malleable have the best chance of outlasting the rest of us?

rest in peace

Only the good die young? Of course, it's only an expression, part of a song, and possibly, at this point, a cliche, but it seems to apply here in the sense that a good man, a "stand-up guy," was killed at age 33.

This father worked second and third jobs to make ends meet, bought gifts for the children of coworkers, and saved a local business from robbery.

And now, nothing.