So. As the days tick by till our son takes his first breath in this world that we all share, I have been thinking on quite a regular basis about “Legacy”. As in, “What Legacy am I going to leave my son?”. It seems as though in todays’ fucked up version of what is acceptable in common society, very few people care about the ramifications of their own personal actions have on their child(ren). And what they, as parents/role models, leave imparted within their children. This thought has wandered in and out of my inner mindscape these past few weeks, and it makes me think of my Dad. My Dad is a great man. And was/is still to this day a great father. My Dad turned 82 on August 2nd of this year, and his mind is starting to weaken. He still does a lot of things that he has always done, and he is very independent, but it is finally starting to slip, and that itself, on a deeper level, depresses me.
I can remember being younger and thinking, like all kids of that age, that my parents didn’t know anything. It wasnt until I got much older that I realized that my Dad was probably the smartest man I knew. Not in an Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking kind of way. But in the fact of he was worldly and had experienced a lot of everything in his days on this planet. I can honestly say that my Dads’ legacy he left inside me. The love of working with my hands, and that will and spirit of mind that says”If I want to create it, I CAN. And I WILL”. My Dad could/can fix/build anything he put his mind too. And that is something I take great pride in sharing with him. And with that bit of shared knowledge, I built a front porch swing from scratch for my wife, which I know she was proud of, and I know my Dad would be as well. Which brings me back to where we started this topic this morning of “Legacy”.
I have a set of goals and dreams that I am going to set into stone, and hopefully given time, will watch bloom into some sort of fruition. I love working with my hands, and with wood itself, and that love is what I want to leave to my son, and hopefully embed that pride into him as well. I also have a love for music that realms onto the obscene, and I have a love for the bass guitar that is over two decades in the making. Which is what I have been leading up to at this point. I am going to start luthiering in the near future, not only for myself and my own piece of mind, but for the sanctity that is my wife and family, and for the love of the child as well. I love playing bass guitar, and how it makes me feel, and I would take great pride in playing an instrument that I crafted myself with my own two hands. And maybe. Just maybe, one day my instruments will make their mark in the music world and be worked over by my musical heroes, or be made masterful by hands of strangers who take pride in what I/we have created. And with that the legacy spreads into the world, whether it be by my hands or those of my child/children. I will take great comfort in the legacy I will have left for my son, and my future children that they can be proud of. To me, that’s what Legacy is about.
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