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Do you remember the day you left home to strike out on your own? I do. It was in October, 59 years ago.
The oldest of six children from a large close-knit family, I was the first to cut the apron strings and move into a place of my own.
It was time to leave. That spring my father, at the age of 40, was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Dad ran the feed mill in town and it was obvious his working years would be cut short by the illness. One less mouth to feed, I figured, would help the situation.
Equally obvious was the fact that Dad and I didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues. He was set in his ways and I was a know-it-all teenager.
I found a sleeping room in our nearby county seat for eight bucks a week. The tenants of the four sleeping rooms above an optometrist's office shared one bathroom. There were no cooking privileges but the rooms were exceptionally clean and the landlords were nice folks.
The next Sunday, with brother Gerald's help, I loaded up as many of my things as would fit in my Chevy. The cargo included my clothing and a bulky old table-top black-and-white television I had purchased a few months earlier.
At that time we were not a hugging family so I simply told my mother good-bye. She seemed quiet. I worried that she would cry which I didn't want her to do because I was afraid I would too. It was silly, really. My new quarters were only 10 miles away but leaving home was not easy. It may not have always been obvious but I really loved my family.
I said good-bye to my father who barely looked up from his Sunday newspaper. I remember wondering why he was so disinterested. Apparently, I thought, the first born leaving home was no big deal to him.
The years went on and I gave little thought to the event other than occasionally recalling how disinterested Dad seemed when I said good-bye.
More than 20 years later, Dad's health had deteriorated to the point we had to move him to a nursing home. I lived nearly three hours away at the time but tried to visit him as often as possible and wrote letters when I couldn't.
Dad's memory was fading and on one Sunday visit a few months before he passed away he didn't remember me. When I greeted him Dad stared at me through glazed eyes and asked, "Are you my son?"
Dad had told me years before that he didn't speak English until he started school. Hoping to cut through the haze, I responded in Low German, assuring him that I was indeed his eldest son. That appeared to jog his memory.
On a later visit, Dad was having trouble remembering recent events. Then, out of the blue, he reminded me that it was so many years ago that month that I had left home. He remembered the actual date, which I had forgotten, along with other details that I had also forgotten.
I realized then that my father was paying attention on the day I left home.
A couple of years later we moved our son into a college dorm 90 miles from our home. I struggled to be tough and not show emotion that day but a few miles out of town on the way home I had to pull off the road to compose myself. I finally understood that what I had perceived as my father's apparent lack of concern the day I left home, may have been his way of being tough and not showing emotion.
Novelist Jean Paul wrote, "It is our kindest and tenderest emotion which we screen from the world."
It's a shame that in our society we men feel we can't be more transparent with our emotions. In screening our kindest and tenderest emotions we prevent the depth of our love and concern from being known by the objects of our love ̶ all for the sake of appearing to be tough.
Another guy named Paul wrote centuries earlier that love is the greatest of all things. I take that to mean that love is even greater than appearing to be a tough guy.
As I've grown older I realize how swiftly the years pass by. Life is too short to be tough all the time.
(Arvid Huisman can be contacted at huismaniowa@gmail.com. ©2026 by Huisman Communications.)