"LETTERS FROM THE ATTIC..."


Dear Son,

It's almost time for me to leave, you know, this life I've lived so long. You've been gone but a few months now, off to the Air Force, well on your way to manhood. I had endeared something better for you, but somehow that no longer seems to matter as you've reached that point in your life where one tends to choose their own path. A path I had hoped to play more of part in help laying, alas. But time is so fleeting and it seems mine has somehow come. Knowing you though, you'll somehow find your way through the bramble and pull yourself through with the fewest of scratches.

It's been a hard life you know, but I seek few excuses. The three of you, your older and younger brothers were all that meant anything to me in this, a most confusing of times. The many failures I've endured are made up for in the knowledge that you three will go on. Establish your own lives, begin your own families, and seek out that which someday you might most desperately want, that which might bring a lifetime of happiness.

That path can be hard and long, you know, what with it's hidden surprises 'round every corner. It can twist and turn to one's dismay, seem as if a never-ending series of roadblocks. It can be steep as the mountain path, leech the wind from your chest as you attempt to scale it. But it can also be as straight as the arrow, guide you with but the slightest of effort, toward that which you could come to eventually seek. Only you and you alone will know for sure, as you begin to chart your own map.

I remember that day which seems so long ago, that fatefully call from the doctor came. God how I feared the worst... fifty-six feet to the concrete below. So little and helpless, I didn't have the chance to see you until they pulled you out of surgery. And then to be told you had but a fifty-fifty chance, that you might yet die, forfeit that I had so wished for you from the start. Those were long worried days, just after your fall. Watching you lay there, not being able to do but one thing. And I prayed and I prayed and I prayed. Prayed like there was no tomorrow, that if I could but put myself in your place. Prayed that somehow you'd just open your eyes, sit up and say "hi dad." Prayed that all was not lost, that you'd, no... that we'd be given another chance.

Somehow, somewhere, somebody heard me.

I can remember you opening your eyes for the very first time, dazed and

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