Heart to Heart 6 Posted on July 16, 2017 Happy Fathers Day! Days like these often make me wonder about both being a father and my own dad Oliver. My dad was in a lot of pain when I knew him. He was born into wealth in Chicago Illinois in 1907. However my experience of him was when we had little money. He had a hundred or more jobs in my eighteen years under the same roof. And we changed the roof 18 times before I graduated high school. He lost most or all of his employment because of drinking alcohol. My mom told me that Ollie was quite the tennis player and he injured his back and had surgery to repair it. She said his physician told him that when the pain got too bad;to drink some whiskey and that would help. Unfortunately my dad used alcohol to deaden all of this pain, whether physical or emotional. He would go on a drinking binge and end up in jail and would come home and sober up and promise he would never drink again. And that never happened. I would wait for him to come home and would watch the front door and I could tell how the door knob turned before he opened the door whether he was drunk again. I share this story because there is some silver lining to it. I became very aware of my environment and I observed much that many others would not notice. It helped my intuition and my sense of another person when I first meet them. It was my intuition that made me a successful intelligence agent while serving country in a time of national crises. I wish I had developed these skills in a happier more loving environment. I can be thankful that out of all the pain and suffering of my childhood that I was able to use the experience to help the world in my own small way. I hope your memories of your father are more pleasant than mine and if they are not; I hope you too can find some gifts out of that experience. From my heart to yours, Thomas