6.14.2006

Father's Day Thought

In Time magazine this week there is an article called "Does Fatherhood Make You Happy?" The author points out that our "memory" will seize on our most "powerful" images. He explains that a guy can sit through an 8 inning boring baseball game but if it ends with a home run in the bottom of the ninth, a glorious memory has been created and the boring eight innings are forgotten. And then he says this: "The . . . moment when our 3-year-old looks up from the mess she is making with her mashed potatoes and says, 'I wub you, daddy,' can erase eight hours of no, not yet, not now and stop asking. Children may not make us happy very often, but when they do, the happiness is . . . both transcendent [above and beyond the ordinary] and amnesic [allowing us to forgot the bad stuff]."