The Parent Lottery

My Dad, Ed Carter is 75 today

The other day I was having a discussion about the Food Bank with a group of fairly well off people.  One of them expressed the opinion we should stop giving children food at school and make their parents be responsible for making sure they were adequately fed.  I know this person is not the only one who feels this way so I went away from the meeting thinking about it.

Later that day the one word answer I needed earlier came to me; Luck.  The people in that room were lucky to have born to the parents they had.  Some of the children who are given lunch at school need it because they were just unlucky to have gotten the parents they have.

Today is my father’s seventy-fifth birthday and I know I am who I am today because of him.  From as early as I can remember my father taught me as much as he knew so I could grow up to be a successful person.

It was often unsettling for me as an adolescent to hear him start a sentence with; “I’m going to tell you this now in case I die soon…” I am sure no one is more surprised than he is that he has made it to three quarters of century.   His sense of urgency definitely molded me.  In his book, children were never too young to take on what we now consider adult tasks.  He made me learn to cook when I was seven, sew when I was eleven, could drive the tractor at age eight and therefore was expected to cut the grass, I was sent door-to-door to sell things, after all he worked at Avon, the company that empowered women through earning their own money.

My father is a great storyteller and he would keep his daughter’s entertained while we did yard work or scraped paint off our antique house which needed painting every year.  His stories were more like parables about work and how to be a good employee or boss.  He always used humor to teach us something because he knew that way we would remember it.

Although he has high expectations of everyone he also is probably the most generous person I know.  That combination means that if you make the grade with him you know it, but if you don’t you know it too.

I recall crying on more than a few occasions when my father pushed me to be more or do more than my natural lazy instinct wanted to.  He would gruffly ask me, “Why are you crying?”  I would scream back, “I don’t know,” and run to my room.  I do know why I was crying.  He was always right.  I could do more and be better.  I was lucky I had a parent who taught me, pushed me and loved me.

Now when people ask me why I do what I do for hungry children I can tell them, it’s not because they just might not have enough food today, but because most of them were not lucky enough to have the father I have.   My best way to honor him is to push the world hard to be a better place and not let our next generation depend the luck of the parent draw.