As we were planning for my father’s memorial service last week, we realized that we needed someone to run the sound system in the back of the chapel.<\/p>\n
Running a CD player isn’t a difficult job, but this was a high pressure situation, and whoever did it would be separated from the rest of his or her family. \u00a0Neither I nor my siblings could do it, because we needed to be up front where we could speak. Asking my mom, of course, was out of the question.<\/p>\n
So we turned to the kids.<\/p>\n
After a couple older cousins turned down the job, I asked my oldest if he could step up.<\/p>\n
“Sure,” he said. “But can you show me how to do it first?”<\/p>\n
“Of course!”<\/p>\n
Well, with everything going on, I forgot all about showing him how to work the CD player. I realized my mistake as the service was starting. I craned my head around to check on him. He met my eyes, flashed a smile, and gave me a thumbs-up.<\/p>\n
It hit me then that of all the people in that chapel, my son was the one doing all the things my dad used to do: taking on the difficult job, figuring out how to do it on his own, and making us all think that he was glad to be doing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pardon me for posting a second consecutive proud papa moment. It’s been that kind of a week. Don’t worry. I’ll be back to the funny on Friday. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-Be","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}