My favorite fathers - and a quote from T. Roosevelt

The father of the year in this family is son Quinn, pictured here with his week-old son, Noah, our first grandchild. Ahhh. The impact of seeing our son with his son.....gob-smacked emotional. I teared up when Heather opened the door and there they were. "See," Quinn said. "I told you she'd do that." I'm so predictable, I will say that an unexpected pleasure of having a grandchild is watching your own "child" perform so beautifully as a parent and husband. But he had some good role models.

A young and gorgeous PK with baby Quinn and Pop Pop Korbulic, 1978. Like father, like son.  Isn't that just what babies need? To be surrounded by people who love them? Pop Pop is gone now.

My father Floyd Strube enjoying a laugh with our youngest son, Chris, 1987. My dad is gone, too.

It isn't just how fathers love their children that makes them a force for good in the universe. It's also how they conduct themselves as individuals, the example they set for their sons—and daughters.  A friend, Jose Marroquin, sent the following quote around this week in honor of fathers, and it resonated. It makes me proud of the fathers and sons in my life.

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
Teddy Roosevelt, Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910.