Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close...Finding Definition as a Dad

If you're a Dad then you should dive right in to Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. You don't have to. I'm not the boss of you, or anyone for that matter. After twelve pages I'm swooning over the young protagonist, Oskar's, affection for his father. It's thought provoking, and affecting, so much so that it catches you off guard. It's the literary equivalent of one of those soldiers coming home to surprise their children videos that get passed around via social media. You'll set the book down just to process it and think about what you've just read. Like...

  Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.

 Maybe I'm a sucker for that stuff...or maybe I've tripped on it because I've never quite found that kind of connection with any kind of role model or mentor...or maybe it's just legitimately the sweetest Father-Son thing ever written...maybe. It's enough to inspire me to ask all of the fathers that I know if their children could say something of that sort about them? If they can't, then why not? If they can, then what did you embody or embrace to achieve such a genuinely beautiful thing?

 If you haven't read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and if you want to feel fatherhood on an entirely different level, maybe you should grab a copy. Go on, the sun's shining, the grass can be cut tomorrow, the weeds pulled another bright, shining day. It'll take only twelve pages to make you swoon, I swear. I would hope that you can find the time for twelve pages, six flips of recycled paper. They're twelve pages that could change your life...six flips that will make you think a little harder than you were before.

 I don't ever want to be too busy for twelve pages that could change my life.  As far as finding some definition of what a Dad is, I'll take the first twelve pages of Safran Foer's brilliant little book.