From the archives of The Friday Read
June 21, 2020
A Salute to Fathers
From the archives of The Friday Read
Today, our thoughts go to our fathers, whether they are no longer on this earth or halfway across the country living in self-quarantine. Here are five stories about fathers that are worth clicking to and digging in.
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** A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality (2017) ([link removed])
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By JAMES VLAHOS, Wired
The first voice you hear on the recording is mine. “Here we are,” I say. My tone is cheerful, but a catch in my throat betrays how nervous I am. Then, a little grandly, I pronounce my father’s name: “John James Vlahos.” “Esquire,” a second voice on the recording chimes in, and this one word—delivered as a winking parody of lawyerly pomposity—immediately puts me more at ease. The speaker is my dad. We are sitting across from each other in my parents’ bedroom, him in a rose-colored armchair and me in a desk chair. It’s the same room where, decades ago, he calmly forgave me after I confessed that I’d driven the family station wagon through a garage door. Now it’s May 2016, he is 80 years old, and I am holding a digital audio recorder.
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** First I Met My Children, Then My Girlfriend. They’re Related. (2018) ([link removed])
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By AARON LONG, The New York Times (Metered Paywall - 1 to 2 articles a month)
I didn’t meet my girlfriend, Jessica, until 12 years after our daughter, Alice, was born. Let me explain. Nearly 25 years ago, I returned from a year of teaching English abroad, moved in with my mother and, lacking prospects, began driving a cab. One day I saw a newspaper ad seeking healthy men, 18 to 35, to participate in a semen donation program. “Donors” is the standard industry word, yet virtually all of us are paid. Forty dollars a pop was what I received in 1994.
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** Virginia Beach woman found WWII photos of her father at her door. Who left them is a mystery. (2019) ([link removed])
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By ROBYN SIDERSKY, The Virginian-Pilot (Metered Paywall - 2 articles a month)
Every day for the past month, Christine Dresser has been consumed with solving a mystery. It's become an obsession. On Christmas Eve, while the family was out of town, someone pulled up to her Green Run home and left three tiny decades-old photos of her late father as a sailor in the Philippines during World War II. They were wrapped around her doorknob with a rubber band. Two she's never seen before.
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** A father-daughter dance — in jail (2013) ([link removed])
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By EMILY WAX, The Washington Post (Metered Paywall - 3 articles a month)
The girls ages 6 to 16 sit in order of size in the drab lobby of the Richmond City Jail, their glittery shoes swinging back and forth. “I don’t like it here,” says Jhaniyika Morman, 6, who covers her eyes, smudging her blue eye shadow and pointing toward the jail’s visitation booths, where inmates are separated from their visitors by thick glass. “I’m nervous. I hope he recognizes me,” mumbles Alexis Atkins, 9, who has her blond hair curled into long ringlets and keeps zipping and unzipping her hot-pink purse.
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** A Father-Son Fishing Trip on the Chesapeake Bay (2014) ([link removed])
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By TIM NEVILLE, The New York Times (Metered Paywall - 1 to 2 articles a month)
The breeze came slow and easy out of the west, and the creek was glassy and calm as if it were just waking up, too. From the wharf in Onancock, a hamlet on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the Onancock Creek courses for about five miles past stately homes and black water coves to empty in the Chesapeake Bay. Out there the waves would be less than a foot high, perfect conditions for our prey.
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