VoiceLog-2026-06-21_Fatherless-Fathers-Day-Memory
VoiceLog-2026-06-21_Fatherless-Fathers-Day-Memory
A Father's Day voice log. A fatherless Father's Day gratitude-filled voice log.
How about another title? Something like, "A Fatherless Father's Day Memory."
Not quite sure how to put this all together. Let me start by telling you a story.
I can vividly remember laying in my bedroom. It was probably a Saturday morning and I stared at the slowly turning model aircraft, like a P-52 and some kind of a fighter jet, hanging from the monofilament line and slowly spinning.
And here I am some 60 something years later listening to the percolating balletta on the propane cooktop. I spent the night making a memory. Well, that's not quite the way to put it. I think I'm saying something about memories, which I don't know how to express, being a gift for the fatherless to give to their children, especially their future fathers.
What can you pass? A memory.
So I spent the child-rearing years helping my kids have memories and I see that they do the same. They build experiences into the minds of my grandchildren. They take them out mountain biking and skiing and to the beach and museums and aquariums and playgrounds and they go. They go explore. They go fill their minds with the unknown around the corner.
And I didn't imagine that would be the legacy I'd be passing.
See, laying there staring at the monofilament and the models, I didn't have guidance. Yeah, I was living in a house with a half-brother, half-sister, and at that point not even a stepfather. Yeah, there was a man in the home but he never spent any time with me. He never made but maybe three memories that I can recall that were not harsh, disciplinary consequences.
Where there was intentional, let me share something with you. So I spent my time either wandering in the Sierra National Forest and Weber Creek looking for things to do, finding old miner shacks and rocks like quartz crystals and fool's gold and things of that nature. Or I would read Danny Dunn and other kind of books and explore in my mind.
So what did I do for this Father's Day? I accepted a gift providentially timed. Yesterday was the first day of posting a completed very first news article made by a team of AI on my laptop telling the story of a maker in Exodus all the way from Docs on Research, Forrest on Intake, Arnie on writing, Cody on the code work HTML, Sid pushing it through FTP and the SQL query and having it distributed or syndicated across the internet on the Skatomaville Fractome, that network of some 4300 websites.
All of that built in a span of from first imagined, like the airplanes in the ceiling, intelligent netware first imagined 29 years ago and I'm telling the story of how that's come about on a Father's Day while I'm in an Airstream, a writer's cabin, a man's cave, having worked late to realize that very first dream, which is what? It's the ability to pass a story as a legacy as I'm doing now from a simple voice recorder or talking straight into the laptop itself and processing that all the way through to a knowledge base which trains the AI to do it better, a full loop.
I think that's a mirror of the loop that I've been given from God. He says he's the fatherless, no he's the father to the fatherless and what I can assure you above the mechanics or the seeming miracle of AI writing code for this lattice for syndication is that my lifespan has been filled with cairns, C-A-I-R-N-S, of provision, meeting, the timing, the need, the provision, protection, and guidance and those three things coming together in a peculiar way that leaves you with the memory.
You see, you don't see God in pillars and smoke, well I don't, but I do see his provision constantly. For example, yesterday Angelina called me and said, "Yay! somebody booked Father's Day." That was they booked yesterday $500 for today which covers some of the arrears in the account because the phone bill had to be paid to keep it on and goes toward the rent due still for the month of June.
So the provision is just there like manna and has been for 71 years for me and it's been 29 years in technology where the tools are just in time for the need for the craftsman to have them to build this.
And now parked at the base of Mount Hood on Father's Day, I get to look out and celebrate with a cup of coffee and a voice recorder and a story to be told to pass on to my kids that God will meet you on Father's Day, even when you're fatherless.
So this will be interesting to see how the team of AI, especially Arnie, writes this up with a scotoma, with a strong heuristic, and a lesson that I can pass forward.
And I imagine going the other way that an optimist trained on these stories helping Angelina around the salt cave or the home, if we should have one in the future, will have some quirky story to tell her on Father's Day. Hey, do you remember Daniel staring at his airplanes dangling from the ceiling and not knowing which direction to go? Yeah, he was a builder, a maker, the dreamer, and boy did he work hard. 29 years to realize this morning, a pipeline that comes full circle, handed to you, the listener, whether you're carbon or silicon. Isn't that the irony in it?
Happy Father's Day!