What Does It Mean?

 

A few of you have seen this sign and remember it well. Even fewer of you have strong memories connected to where it stands or one of the businesses that paid to have their services and goods announced on this particular Ohio backroad.

What does it mean?

(This is, in case you haven't guessed by now, the question I ask most in my life: what does it mean?)

Could a sign be more polysemic?

Not only are the divergent references on the sign a little overwhelming, but the apparent aging of some of the lettering casts questions about whether the reference points themselves may have faded just like the weathered paint.

The cacophony of style, color, spacing, fonts and graphics also raises questions about the relationship between the authors or within the author (or amongst the competing corporate style guides?).

For me the meanings of the sign are (of course) tethered to my lifelong interest in representation and the ways that history and tradition shape our cultural vantage points.

But much more salient in this particular picture (for me), is the "6 YEARS AGO" banner affixed by the timehop app reminding me that this sign was both a rare and regular part of my journeys each summer to drop my kids off at Camp Wakonda for a week of becoming autonomous and happy humans.

The correspondence of the flood of those memories on this Fathers Day weekend is braided together with all the complex reflections about what it means to parent, what it means to be a father, how all those meanings are constantly in flux and constantly still happening.

I had a really nice Fathers Day which was kicked off by a loving call from my son who I haven't seen in almost a year. Elaborated in a series of adventures with my adult daughter who has been living here in the Unger Lanning Lemke House with me for the last few delightful weeks. Also including a funny and delightful conversation with my own father - a paradigm of good fathering through all the seasons of my life.

All of us who are fathers or who bring fathering energy into the world are shaped by the beautiful and difficult ways that these endeavors have surprised us by investing us in lives other than our own.

And all of us who ever had a father or didn't or lost a father or lost a relationship with our father? We are also shaped in profound ways by these relationships.

These meanings are as complex and beautiful, as crazy and divergent, as sad and inspiring as this crazy quilt of messaging that stands in a field an hour south of whereI am right now.

And these meanings are all still standing in our past - an hour (or farther) from where we're standing right now.

These meanings animate our hopes, our dreams, our regrets, our inadequacies.

What does it mean?

For me right now? I'm extra-grateful for the ways that time changes the meaning of things. How time and memory allows me to hear harmonies and counter-melodies and rhythms I couldn't hear in the moment.
Reveals poetic patchworks of continuity and recurrence that I couldn't see before.

In other words, from today's vantage point? It's a good sign.