Highways and Byways: A Father, a Son, and a Game of Fractions

By Maik Strosahl

Birthdays have a tendency to put me in a melancholy mood. I know that is not an earth-shattering revelation, as many do not enjoy the aging process for a variety of reasons. My reason is really just a game of fractions.
    My father is eighty years old today. I was born two days before his 27th birthday.
    When I was young, I told him I would someday catch up with him. In elementary school, as I learned fractions, I told him that I could prove this fact. When I was 9, he was 36 and I was a quarter of his age. I explained that when I reached the age of 27, I would be exactly half of his age. Then, every year that passed afterwards, I would be gaining until I would eventually catch him. Even then I understood it was just a joke, yet it was a laugh we shared together.
    Due to his religious belief, my father has not celebrated a birthday since I was born. Even so, for many years, two days before his birthday, we talked. Many times it was just a phone call, yet he always remembered my fractured reasoning and would update me what the current ratio was.
    I also did not celebrate my birthdays, but as life happens, I had to make changes in my belief system – some of them not so popular with my parents. And while I respect them for holding to their convictions, I could not continue to follow that same path.
    My father is eighty years old today. I have not heard his voice in years. Oh, he still lives in the house I grew up in, but we are distanced by something I cannot repair. Yet, I know that he knows I am catching up with him.
    He would not appreciate me wishing him a happy birthday, but I will share that the current fraction is 53/80.


I love you, Dad, and I miss you very much.

Copyright © 2021 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there.

A Father’s Personal Impressions

Of “A Little Slice of Fife”

By Brooks Carder

My son Marshall has told the story of our golfing trip to Scotland so well that it doesn’t need a different perspective to be told from. But perhaps I can add to the story by citing some of my personal impressions and experiences.

Mom’s last good-bye

By Vic Midyett

In about 1971, less than two years after my parents and Anita and I arrived in Perth from our missionary days in India, my mother found out that she had cancer in her lymph nodes and one breast. She had that breast removed and made jokes about not playing with her fake one when she wasn’t wearing it.

103 years ago today

My father was born on this day in 1905. Over the years of my own adulthood and middle age I've seen so much of my father in my own mannerisms of body and speech, and yet he remains largely an unknown man to me. That is, though I perhaps knew him as well as most men know their fathers, I feel that there's more about him that I don't know and never even suspected than that I did come to know.

Somehow, beginning as a bookish teenager, I felt there was a kind of divide between him and me, a division that afforded me much grief of longing, particularly during my late twenties and my thirties, when my own children were young. I felt a mysterious need to connect with my dad, to somehow get on the same wavelength of understanding and feeling. It's hard to define what the "connection" would have been, or exactly what was missing that I thought needed to be there. I never felt that the connection got made or the missing parts got filled in. At some point in the final years of his life (1976-1980) I accepted that they never would. I even convinced myself that that was okay, even though I don't really think it was.

Could it have been a simple failure to really know that he loved me, or a failure on my part to really appreciate him, to understand to what extent his life had consisted of pleasure, to what extent of pain? He grew up the oldest child of a large family. At an age when I was reading books, attending school everyday, preparing for college, he was working a mule in the fields (in Arkansas) to help feed his brothers and sisters. That is, he didn't have my "advantages," and ironically it was probably those very advantages that constituted the gulf that I felt divided us. My so-called advantages pushed me into a world more of the mind and the imagination than of everyday, present reality.

Anyway, Dad, I just wanted to tell you again, as I did my best to tell you almost thirty years ago, that I love you. I still love and always will love you, even if my understanding of you was imperfect and my memory of you is at best an approximation of who you really were. And thanks again for everything.