by Frank Roche on March 31, 2011
in Thoughts
Today would have been my dad’s 87th birthday. He didn’t make it anywhere near there. Radiation got him. Radiation from a A-bomb.
That makes me think about those people in Japan who are being lied to about their exposure to radiation. When my dad was in the Navy after WWII, they ringed the Bikini Atolls with ships and dropped bombs. Then they told the sailors that they would get no harm. Just wash off with Felz-Naptha soap.
Didn’t work.
Urethra. Bladder. Kidneys. All removed.
Liver. Lung. Can’t live without those.
There’s a lot of cancer ahead for those people in Japan. I wish they would be told the truth.
by Frank Roche on January 21, 2009
in Thoughts
by Frank Roche on December 17, 2008
in Thoughts
Is there ever a good thing to come when someone, when asked a question, says, “Do you want an honest answer?”
Ba-da-boom. The rest of the answer is never what the questioner wants. Oops.
by Frank Roche on June 4, 2008
in Thoughts
When I was a kid we didn’t have parents hovering over us every second. I served 6am mass every morning at Immaculate Conception from the time I was in First Grade until I was in Eighth Grade. (Every day. I’m not kidding about that. They taught us the Latin Mass back then and I knew it cold when I was little.) I had a 20-minute walk to the basilica, and in the winter in Chicago it was mighty dark. Do you think my parents drove me? Nope. Not once.
We played “Army” with dirt clods in Powell Park. We rode our bikes everywhere. We were sent to the grocery store by our parents and we walked home with our arms aching from the paper bag loads. We went trick-or-treating without parents anywhere to be seen when we were 5 years old. Sometimes it would have been good if we would have had a little more supervision — like when Frankie Fick got shot through the liver when we were all 8 years old; or when Richard fell from the top of his garage onto the back of his head; or the time I fell down three stories right on my chin because I thought I could slide down our back porch support.
Things are different now.
Kids have helicopter parents. They don’t have any breathing room. They’re not toughened up. That’s why “Quit Coddling Your Kids” really resonates with me. Read it, especially the one about making them work for what they get. I like that idea.
by Frank Roche on March 17, 2008
in Thoughts
