This is a great post. Your stories about your father really resonate with me. My father was an ER doctor. When I was in college, he and I ended up living together in the same small apartment for a while and I would hear him waking up and getting ready for work. His "pep" talk to himself was so angry and profanity-laced, as to be comical. Many mornings it included the actual phrase: "...another [expletive deleted] day in the salt mines!" But I guess it was just what it took for him to show up for his job in a professional way.
Also...oddly enough I am right now attempting to memorize the "Football is a game of inches" speech from Any Given Sunday. One of the greatest pep talks in film history, IMO, and one which hits especially hard now that I'm middle aged.
This is a great post. Your stories about your father really resonate with me. My father was an ER doctor. When I was in college, he and I ended up living together in the same small apartment for a while and I would hear him waking up and getting ready for work. His "pep" talk to himself was so angry and profanity-laced, as to be comical. Many mornings it included the actual phrase: "...another [expletive deleted] day in the salt mines!" But I guess it was just what it took for him to show up for his job in a professional way.
Also...oddly enough I am right now attempting to memorize the "Football is a game of inches" speech from Any Given Sunday. One of the greatest pep talks in film history, IMO, and one which hits especially hard now that I'm middle aged.
I have tried to understand my father since he passed.
He, too, was in the army.
He enlisted after high school and was stationed in Korea a few years after the war.
It seems to me like the army was a permanent way-out in the same way that it seems like a permanent way-in today.