Start building bridges now!

It helps to keep things in perspective. Every time I get frustrated with my inability to make a connection with my oldest son, I then think about how much worse things can always turn out to be in my life. This really applies to everything that surrounds me. For example, here I've been totally consumed with my home flooding problem, yet I do have a home. Yesterday, as I opened my Internet browser the front page Yahoo story was "Homes evacuated in San Antonio as hill crumbles." As terrible as it was for me to have to deal with a few continuous days of rain that kept flooding my living room, these poor folks in San Antonio Texas have been having to deal with a much more devastating turn of events. Don't even get me started with the horrendous situation in Haiti, mother nature has a way of causing so much chaos in the lives of so many innocent people.

I took off from work at noon yesterday in an effort to finish digging a trench that I started on Sunday which is now home of 70 feet of 4 inch wide leach pipe that should drain most of the water that was flooding my home away and on to my front yard and street. While digging I found huge stones, water pipes, and even electrical pipes that all became obstacles and influenced the amount of labor needed to get the job done. Yesterday, after nine more hours of continuous work, I completed the largest part of the project. Now all that remains is to make things look pretty again. As exhausted as I am today, I feel a great sense of accomplishment and pride from having completed the job. If it works properly then the water level surrounding the footing at the back of my home should never reach high enough to flood my living room again. If it does not work as planned, then I am going to have to add more drainage from the other side of my home, which will mean another three to four days of back breaking work.

There is an upside to all of this since I regained contact with an old friend that was very helpful throughout the project. When he was able to make himself available to lessen my burden, we caught up with more than 7 years of our lives that had transpired since the last time we were in contact. As we planned our strategy to solve my leaky dilemma, drove around shopping for materials, later spent several days digging the trench, and finally put the entire plan into action, stories from our past history together climbing mountains, fixing cars, and both of us doing many other home projects together filled any and all empty space and time. I find it extremely interesting how bonding all of the above can be between friends. We truly have a lot of history together with stories of shared back breaking labor and even rattle snake encounters too.

If so much can be gained by the bond that friends develop while doing things together, just imagine how powerful a bond and all that there is to be gained by a father doing some of these things with his children too. So here is some free advice to any parent that is reading this post and still has the opportunity to get involved with the kids. Take advantage while they are young to spend time doing things together. Not only will you have the chance to teach them how to fix things, grow things, or make things, but you will also be building bridges for use in the future of your relationship with your them. Even though I always liked involving my kids in the process of getting things done around the house, I feel like I did not do it enough. There were too many wasted opportunities in which I knew that I could get the job done faster and probably better by simply doing it on my own, so I took the easier way out. What I did not know at the time was that these were my chances to build the bridges that would later on in life help cross the gap between older and younger men. I really wish I would of known this sooner. It is a lot harder now than it really has to be since I find myself feeling as if I am walking barefoot across the cold emotional water between us. But then again, it is really a matter of perspective, since I know that things can be much worse. It is not as if I never did it, since I can recall many times in which I got my boys involved in what I was doing. I just wish I had done it a lot more often.

Dad