Long overdue eulogistic post

News of my father’s death, which solidified his passing, filled me with odd mixtures of emotions and feelings some wrapped up securely in afterthoughts of long ago and others still feeling the glow of new. Every so often now, unlike each prior passing moment to minute to hour to period to afternoon to day to week to month, a ghost voice calls in my head…just so every often now, hear? That voice commands and deserves respect from surviving flame and rock, water and space, for it emanates from that same place from which all does. Commonly human beings speak of divine love, but rarely do they truly know its terror. For, only the most righteous of character, those who do not wrong any-thing or –one and love concretely to universally, will see the next phase in goodly manner. It prophetically utters of something unknown that will manifest later. Not now, for he is tired….

The Eulogy for James Nicholas Potter I follows:

Who was Jim Potter?

Was he the man of his plethora of stories?
An athlete of considerable prowess…
A hellion in Grandville forced into the Marines…
A fisherman—from whom not many got away…
A hunter at one with the land…

Or was he the man that some others saw?
A strict authoritarian…
A generous and benevolent friend…
A quick temper…
A beekeeper and tree-trimmer…
A fishing-hole zealot…
A gatherer of wildlife out of sanctioned season…

I know he was
A father…
A husband twice over…
A man bent on correcting the wrongs in his life…

In the end, if we face not ourselves and that part of us others know, unknown to us, with equanimity and candor, then we know little more than what we want to say we are…The Jim Potter I knew was headed down a path that wanted to move between the lines, blurring them into obscurity.