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As I looked at the clock I gasped with fear. An unpleasant anxiety entered into my soul as looked for a place to hide. He would be home any minute bringing anger and bitter disappointment to this previously joyous day.

This was the everyday state of affairs as my father came home from work. He worked in a loading dock, a job, he detested, but kept only to keep food on our table.

Growing up I had hated him. Who was he to invade our lives each evening? Why couldn't I have a father like everyone else?

In the innocence of my youth I was blind to the pressures of adult life. Paying bills, buying groceries, spending money on clothes, to me these things all seemed to appear out of thin air and with great ease. I just didn't understand why this man, my father, was so bitter and angry. I had always assumed it was me, that I wasn't wanted or didn't live up to his expectations. It was not until I became a father myself that I understood these pressures and was able to forgive my father. I realized he was only doing what he had to do to support us.

In my youth, like all children, I had promised myself that I would grow up to be different. I would tell my self that when I was a father I would be kind and loving always. This changed when on a warm and sunny day in may I was forced into a sad realization. I had not only become like my father but I had agreed that this was the only way to be. I had a family, quit school, and worked at a job which I hated. When I came home from work I brought disappointment and anger with me.

His death on that day brought a wave of confusion into my life. He had died at fifty-one years young, working in a job that he hated doing. If his way, my way, was the way in which we live our lives then why was he taken so young and with so little to leave his family. This, although I didn't know it at the time, was the greatest gift he left me. I now could question my philosophy on life the exact one I had adopted from my father.

At the funeral I saw relatives I had never seen before and when they spoke of my father it was as if they spoke of a man I had never met. I heard stories of a passionate youth out to make his mark on the world. I was told of a young man with a creative genius and ingenuity unmatched by any other. People spoke of a boy who ran away and joined a traveling circus. My dad was a puppeteer who entertained hundreds of children! "They must be lying"! "This could not be the same man laying in that casket"! They went on to say that he had been

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