What are you fondest memories from your childhood? I suspect they are things that your family did that were ritualistic in nature. They may also have been the better family vacations. Family rituals are touchstones in your life and the lives of your children. Just as habits and routines become comforting, so do the rituals you establish in your family.
I am quite happy to write this column from the vantage point of some distance from the pain of my own 
father’s death and the time I was alone, separated, and then divorced, and raising my boys 24/7. But, it only seems appropriate to reflect on those times, the positive memories of my dad, and the contrasting struggle of teaching my boys, much younger then, to remember their own father.
My father was a unique man: stoic, hard working, resistant to complaints, and whining, and completely in love with my mother. David Sallan died where he was happiest, right next to my mom, holding her hand, at 90 years of age. They met when he was 17 and she was 14, by a lake in Michigan; he was the sun-tanned water-worshipper, she was the shy, pale, redhead with a brain. He was brawn; she was class. And, he worshipped her from the day he laid eyes on her.
