In honor of Father’s Day, here’s a re-post of a quote from How Green Was My Valley, that I originally posted a few years back:
There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy. Green it was, and possessed of the plenty of the Earth. In all Wales, there was none so beautiful. Everything I ever learned as a small boy came from my father and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless. The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind as if I had heard them only yesterday.
I wish my memory were that good but I do tell people in such times that the past is as real as the present, that the limittations of our memory does not make that less real, that we are still in the past with our loved ones, that that was, is and always shall be.