Postcards from your travels all over the world —before you had a family and had to settle down and give up your wanderlust dreams.
I can relate.
Now that I am in my late twenties, I too, have had to give up something I dearly loved (my passion for mixed martial arts and my desire to be a professional fighter) and get a job to make ends meet. Now that I too, have bills to pay and rent to meet and a flowering relationship that may or may not blossom into marriage, I can relate to the stresses you went through. I can understand what exactly went through your head all those years ago when your innocent son asked you a question about Passion and you answered with Money.
And now that you are retired and no longer working, I get to spend the time that I so dearly craved when I was a boy growing up with you.
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Your business did not succeed.
It had little to do with you. You did all that you could. You put in all the work it was possible for one man to put in—and then some.
I know that you look back on those years you spent working with a tinge of regret. I know that you ask yourself questions, questions such as the would-haves, the should-haves, the could-haves.
I am writing you this letter to tell you that there is nothing to regret.
More than that, I am writing you this letter to tell you that those long years you spent working? They were not lost. They were not wasted.
They have taught your son, who was present through it all, through your rise and your fall, valuable lessons that he will remember for the rest of his life.
Through you, I have learned that hard work is necessary for success, yes. But I have also learned that hard work is only a component of success. One should also be firm and smart, as well as learn how to delegate. You should never have been a chef as well as an owner. We should've looked harder for a suitable man for the job. We should also have probably told those drunken customers to sod off…
Many an hour would have been saved—and a certain man might have lived to see another day.
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But beyond all that, I have learned that it is important for a man to spend time with his family.
Now that you're retired, you often drive me around in your car. I tell you that you do not need to do it. You do it anyway. You do it out of love, yes. You do it to save me the time I would otherwise spend traveling. But, as is the case with the folk songs that were playing in the restaurant that now only exists in the dim recesses of my memory, I suspect that you are doing it because of other reasons.
I suspect you are doing it because you want to spend time with me.
Sitting beside you in your beat-up Prius, we talk about all sorts of things: about life, about music—and yes, about Work and about Money. We talk about all the things that we should've talked about when I was little and you were still young.
But it doesn't matter. You are still alive, the car is still rolling, and as the miles stretch on it strikes me that I am a very lucky man to have my father here with me, to be able to now provide for him the same way he did for me. I am very lucky to be able to see life come full circle.
I am glad to have had a father like you, workaholic though you may be. Thinking back, I realize that as stoic and inexpressive as you are, Work was perhaps the only way you could express yourself to me. And express yourself you did. Your actions spoke louder than ten thousand flowery words ever could. Through your actions, you have managed to bring up your family. Through your actions, you have shown me what to do, and perhaps just as importantly, what not to do, in this wild and wondrous journey we call life.
And that, really, is all a father can do. And I love and appreciate you for it. I just wanted to make sure that you know it, both in the form of actions and words: hence this open letter addressed to you.
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