Opinion : Better than Dad\'s

"If I get the farm, I am going to tear this down and build a better one."

Abigail couldn't wait to rat out her sister Lydia, for what she said while they were helping me build a small picnic shelter area on a concrete slab where my grandfather once had a corn crib.

But when I heard what my 14-year-old said, my reply was simply, "I hope she does."

My shelter is a very low-budget project that I am actually designing as I build. Yeah, yeah, I know. But so far, it doesn't look so bad, at least in my opinion.

But Lydia is right. It could be done better, with real plans and better materials. I hope someday, she does get the chance to make a better picnic shelter than I did. I hope she has more money to spend on it, better plans, better materials, and someone with more building knowledge and experience than me.

In a sense, the shelter is a concrete example of what we as dads hope for our children: Something better.

I know my dad and grandfather felt that way. Grandpa suffered a severely broken leg as a young man, and it limited his opportunities. Yet, I have heard from dozens of people who knew him, and they all have good things to say about how hard he worked. My father grew up with a severe vision problem, suffered a serious car accident at 25 and had his first heart attack at age 38. He, too, was keenly and painfully aware of his limitations.

As a dad, I am at a place where I hear my younger children say what they would like to to better, and also at the place where I can see my older kids starting out life and jobs and college. They are doing better than I did financially, and avoiding some of the mistakes they saw me make. That's the way it should be.

This will be my seventh Father's Day without a father (and ninth without a grandfather) to call or visit. I have the rare privilege of carrying on what they started, at least at our family farm. I have been trying to renovate the place, remove some weeds, plant some trees and find a way to bring out the beauty of its nature.

I am not, as my dad and grandfather, a gardener. They loved planting potatoes and other vegetables each year until their deaths. Me, I prefer working with trees and landscaping. Even though I think they would be happy with the improvements I made in the house, I find myself apologizing to Grandpa when I walk through the areas that used to be his gardens.

The old cliché shows fathers telling their children, "Someday this will all be yours." But I think the silent aspiration contained in that sentence is, "I hope that whatever you do, you will do it better than your father."