To my son Tommy,
It has been a long time coming since I started a letter with those words. It is not because I lost interest in writing to you these stories and life lessons. It is not because the lack of events or ongoings of our world or the greater world around us. (For there are so many things that have happened ranging from pandemics to personal family health issues to just amazing moments of watching you grow into a fine young man.) Nor is it because I stopped writing, though I just haven't put pen to paper or finger to keyboard to digital imprint. No. For the past years, I often would write in my mind; I would find the perfect sentence, the perfect topic, the perfect lesson, and would write the whole thing in my brain as I would drive, or sit, or find a moment to daydream away at work. Alas, those near perfect words (as my mind saw them at the time) are gone, shuffled away or filed without context like a lost post-it note or scrap piece of paper thrown into the junk drawer of my sentient file cabinet.
The real reason I stopped writing is this blog became a chore. The tremendous amount of joy it brought to me imagining you reading these words in your future life was overcome by the amount of work and tasks and overwhelming issues of the present. I had to pare down and eliminate all those excess things in life, and unfortunately writing made the chopping block. I probably should have found other things to drop from my life, but, when you are beset with just the challenges of living and surviving from day to day, you do what you have to do.
But one thing I learned from your Grandpa Leo: It is never too late to start again. And so I will try. The words and the feelings and most importantly the love for you are there. They never really left. Perhaps now I will find the time, and make the time, to illuminate and enlighten through this blog once again. Maybe illuminate and enlighten is overreaching, but at the least I will write to you and you can later separate the few pearls of wisdom from the piles of Irish bullshit I put forward.
Sincerely with love from your dad,
Leo
