Looney Tunes, my son, and my dad

When I was eight years old, my parents were divorced. It was a traumatic time for me and my family.

For my dad, his world was turned upside down. His family gone and he moved to Boise from Twin Falls, Idaho. He started a new job. For six months he lived in a hotel and then he bought a mobile home.

For my dad and me, our relationship changed dramatically. I didn't really know my dad until I was eight. Before that he worked all the time and when he wasn't working, the relationship with my mom and dad was caustic at best.

After the divorce and when dad moved to Boise, he literally had to deal with me. We loved each other, but we were essentially strangers.

But suddenly, he had a kid every other weekend that he had to entertain because of visitation rights.

He did not have a clue about how to entertain eight-year-old boy. We watched a lot of TV and we went to a lot of drive-in movies.

But we cherished those memories. He taught me a lot. He taught me to barbecue (Dad was a much better cook than Mom!), make wonderful scrambled eggs, enjoy old movies, a love history, respect our ancestors, a love of old cars, taught me to draw, and instilled a love of politics. And he had an enviable wit.

When I started to drive, I would take my dad to Kalispell, Montana to visit family. Those were some of my best times with my dad.

At 63 years old my dad was diagnosed with liver cancer. The death of parent is awful but I'm so glad I had time to spend with my dad when he was dying. Nothing was left unsaid.

One night my dad told me that one of his biggest regrets was that he will never see my children. When he said that, he seemed to cry a little bit.

But there was no child in my horizon at that point. It wasn't until I was 43 that I had the experience to have a son. I often think about my dad wondering about a lot of things.

When my second stroke happened, I was carried through the hallways in the bowels of the hospital to have another brain scan.

I just knew that my dad was there telling me that I would be okay. I don't know how I knew that but I had a vivid memory of that. And he had been dead almost 20 years.

Really my relationship with my dad started when I was eight years old. And it was a great relationship.

So now my son is eight years old. I think about my son and our relationship.

The stroke had to have affected him in so many ways that I don't really know yet.

It took me several months to recover to the point that he would really talk to me. It helped that I could write a bike several months after the stroke.

Every day things mean a lot to me now because I realize how life is precious. I treasure the memories I'm making with my son.

This morning, my eight-year-old son crawled in my lap when he awoke. Ethan said, “Daddy, Can we watch cartoons together?"

My dad and I used to watch “Looney Tunes” all the time. And my son loves “Looney Tunes” also.

Is it coincidental that “Looney Tunes” helped repair the relationship with my father and it is helping repair my relationship with my son? The generational thing? I don't know.

My son, Ethan Stanford, was named after my dad, Stanford. I miss my dad.

The Two Faces of the American Dream

The massive wave of Norwegian immigration to Minnesota from the 1850s through the early 20th century wasn't a casual choice; it was an escape from crushing land scarcity and economic desperation. My ancestors, the Dunhams, arrived in 1851 and built a life in Otter Tail County in Minnesota. My great-great-grandfather, Jens Christian Dunham, didn’t just survive—he thrived. He served in the Minnesota legislature as a Republican from 1888 to 1890 and later became a staunch advocate for President Teddy Roosevelt. He was the literal embodiment of the American Dream: an immigrant who fled poverty to become a lawmaker in his new home. Fast forward a century, and a new wave of immigrants—this time from Somalia—is following that exact same blueprint. Like the Norwegians before them, they fled hardship to build a future in Minnesota, and many have run for office to serve the state that welcomed them. Yet, the political rhetoric surrounding these two groups couldn't be more polarized. Don...

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I met with my eye doctor last week about taking some time off from my vision therapy. I have been doing therapy since my stroke almost two and a half years ago. I am tired, and a need a break. My doctor said, “This is completely understandable. Take some time off.” At the appointment, my doctor tested my vision. Because of the strokes, my vision was affected, and I have a problem in my field of vision on the right side. I have a deficit with my right side peripheral vision. However, it is getting better. During the test, I told him that I “sense things on the right side of my peripheral vision.” It seems that I know that something is there, but I cannot really distinguish what it is. He told me that there is a body of thought describing phantom vision or phantom blindness. A Polish researcher, L. Bieganowski, described this phantom blindness this way: “The subject of the paper is the phenomenon of phantom vision. It occurs among the blind (or almost blind...

Greek orthodox and Catholic‘s

Being a history buff, I’ve always understood that the Catholic Church was split in about 1000 A.D. Our Greek tour guide mentioned the differences a little bit yesterday, but she did not capture the full history. Today I saw a small Greek orthodox by the roadside and I’m going to insert about the history. Eastern Orthodox Catholics and Roman Catholics are the result of what is known as the East-West Schism (or Great Schism) of 1054, when medieval Christianity split into two branches. The Byzantine split with Roman Catholicism came about when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, King of the Franks, as Holy Roman Emperor in 800. From the Byzantine viewpoint, this was a slap to the Eastern Emperor and the Byzantine Empire itself — an empire that had withstood barbarian invasions and upheld the faith for centuries. After Rome fell in 476, Byzantium was the only vestige of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne’s crowning made the Byzantine Emperor redundant, and relations between the East and...

Dunham Family and My Stroke Story!

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