Sudden Introspection

Weather: clear but a little muggy. May be in for some rain.
Slugs: One. He tried to take out my tire.
Wallet contents: one piece of paper.

Not my wallet. About a half-mile from home, I rode past what I realized was a tan leather wallet on the side of the road. I stopped and walked back to it, my mind already spinning with grandiose tales of its history and future.

It was a tri-fold with a flip-out bit (so a quad fold?) - completely empty. No cards, no cash, no receipts, no IDs. The only thing in it was a slip of paper in the ID window, on which was written

Please forgive me.

- A.K.

So there went my plans of being a hero returning a lost wallet, or finding some strange story, or even just five bucks. No smoking gun to some major mystery or crime... just "please forgive me." Forgive who? Well, AK obviously... so who was AK writing to? A boyfriend, a spouse, a brother, a best friend? Was the wallet lost, or discarded? Stolen? What if that wallet was the last reminder of AK... is that a good thing or bad?

I forgive you, AK. For trying, at least.

In a similar vein of unexpected reflection, Jerry Holkins (aka Tycho Brahe) of Penny Arcade posted a startling piece on their website today. I've always admired how much Holkins clearly enjoys writing - he plays with words the way a five-year-old plays with mashed potatoes. But he's also simply talented as hell, and today's piece was just that. No glib, no play-on-words, no punctuation for the glory of punctuation. Just raw emotion sculpted into razor-sharp sentences, parallel stories of his own son and his father's son - of his father and his son's father. Read it, but sit down first.

I love my father. He's a little scary, has a wit like fine-grain sandpaper, and is the kind of smart you get from living as fully as possible. He's not a geek spilling over with trivia and observations... he just knows the right answers. For the past few years my tongue-in-cheek refrain has been "I can't wait to turn into my dad." But reading Holkins' piece tonight, I couldn't help but latch onto one particular emotion: we all want to give our children even better than our parents gave us. Surely we can correct for the mistakes we watched them make.

How do you live up to someone who did everything right, who gave you everything you needed? I couldn't wait to turn into my dad... but I was just thinking of him as a man. As a father... how do you live up to someone who did almost everything right?