Rhyner Washburn, Answer to Question 4. If you had to choose a common theme for each of the father essays in Short takes, what would it be? Why?

The common theme for the father essays is that there is no "perfect " father, but there is the dream of an ideal father. In Confession, Stuart Dybek illustrates for his readers the relationship between him and his priest. Now a father son relationship, the father would help his son in all ways possible whereas here the priest is merely a hungover religious figure not even trying to to console the boy or elevate him of his grief. The boy (Dybek) sees this in the end and knows how to deal with the sins his commited and walks out caring less what father Boguslaw says. Kind of Blue takes the reader to the mind set yet again to the boy watching his father, though really the boy is not literally watching him. He talks of how his father wants to just up and leave his family because the father would normally feel a guilty conscience and not even contemplate such a thought. He would say to himself how he can't or rather "won't let himself" leave the boys even if the marriage between him and Maria is in the can.It is this thought of leaving that is this father's flaw. In the end he stays, but the thought remains. Should I leave? Nothing good could come out this marriage? It is this thoughts that stir inside the father's mind that trouble the narrator, the author himself Sebastian Matthews.

Son of Mr. Green Jeans is a compilation of celebrity fathers, wolves, and Sputnik I fill the pages of Dinty W. Moore's essay. Each segment explains, review, and tells the reader what kind of dads are out there. Some of TV's famous dad's are less than up to the task. For example, Hugh Beaumont hated kids. Yet he played a father on TV. Dinty gives us the realtiy of his own life between him and his father and even between him and his father. None of it was pretty, but he sstill had the vision of the "ideal" father from watching shows like Leave it to Beaver and such. Those fathers like Hugh Brannum gave Moore insight and sought to be better than his predecessors. Michael Datcher's The Spinners is very interesting because it talks of urban family life for boys and how nearly no fathers were present in their up bringing. Datcher explains that this "neighborhood men" couldn't be trusted. Somewhere out there, their sons want attention, yet here they are giving advice to children that are not their own. The essay points out that this boys want to be better than their father by raising a family and sticking witht the family and not shoving to the side. These boys want to be the "ideal" fathers they hear, watch, and read about.