20190615.0430

I have posted in this webspace on five previous 15ths of June: in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. It seems clear to me that I have gotten more diligent about posting as I have moved along. It's a good thing, far better than the opposite. I am uncertain how long I will be able to keep it going, though. There is much that needs my attention, and I am concerned that, at some point, the other work I do will prevent me from attending to this. I do work to foster a buffer, and retrospection is helpful with that (the materials I treat are already present, so I do not have to wait for things like I do when I am commenting on current events), but building a buffer takes time, and I may not always have as much of that available as I would like to have. And I may not be in a good frame of mind to write when I have the time--if I ever am; I know some might look at what I write and argue that I am not.
The two prose pieces among the five I've posted on this date in past years (the other three are verse) attract some attention. The first one, from 2014, reflects a bit on my first Father's Day as a father and upon my then-new fatherhood. (I still sit on the Arc of Attention, though I can already feel myself slipping towards the Trough of Delusion; Dad still floats on the Sea of Sagacity, even if he has to bail out his boat occasionally.) I am still learning how to be a decent father; while I flatter myself in many ways, I do not pretend that I do a good job at it. Honestly, the best I do is get out of the way and let Ms. 8 be her own excellent self, stepping in on occasion to pick something up she can't heft herself--and there seem to be fewer such things each day. That's as it should be; I won't always be here, and she'll need to be able to face the world without me, probably for longer than I'll be here to help her.
The other prose piece recalls a pleasant story. Ms. 8 has at this point long since given up pacifiers, though I think I might still have the one I retrieved from the stagnant ditch in the City of Thunder. (There is something nice about the kenning-like reference to cities; the metonymic names seem make the places less prosaic and more, somehow. But I am a nerd and given to rolling around in fantasy literature, so I would be expected to think such things.) She does still clutch her long-held and well-worn softie, though, and I know that I should be working to wean her away from it as I did her pacifiers and her bottles before. At the same time, I also know that her holding it does no harm. It is a shaped and stuffed piece of cloth given her by her mother's mother; it is a thing had since before she was born, a physical link to her earliest life. I have few such things available to me, and I prize them (though I have not always done so as I likely ought to have done). Why I would take hers from her is unclear to me.
Such questions as whether or not I ought to persuade her away from her softie are frequently in my mind. As I approach another Father's Day, I wonder how common a thing it is to question so.