Welcome to episode 117 of the Recovery Show. This episode is brought to you by

Allison and Anthony. They use the donation button on our website. Thank you

Allison and Anthony for your generous contributions. This episode is for you.

This episode is for you.

I'm recording this on Father's Day.

I'm recording this as I walk through the wild area behind my church after service this morning and reflecting on

what it is like to be a father what my father was like, what I was like as a father both before and after coming

into the program, how coming into Al-Anon has changed the way that I'm a father, how it I think

enabled me to be a better father.

And I think I want to start by reflecting back on my childhood and my father and my interactions with him.

He was a good father. He was a good father, a loving father, although not outwardly so I think. I don't remember a lot

a lot of physical affection from him as a child.

But what I do remember, what he did do for us was to

you will sort of make us understand that we could do whatever we set our minds to and that

he supported us in that. He was a photographer. He worked basically his entire

career for the Eastman Kodak Company as an executive and so was able to bring his passion into his work and his

work into his passion. I got my first camera when I was six years old and it was a little brownie camera.

It took 12 photos on a roll of film.

Very simple, very straightforward, and I learned a lot by just being able to play with

it. There was no message about, oh, you have to be only take the right pictures because I think

He understood maybe from his own experience that the only way to really learn something was by doing it and by making mistakes.

And sometimes those mistakes turned out to be glorious mistakes.

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