A.L.S.O. Love
I’m thinking today of fathers, grandfathers, stepfathers.
My father gone at 53( Cancer) –
A really good man.
My two grandfathers –
I didn’t know them.
Grandfather Breen – Olinda/Campberwell
( Cancer) at about 57
Grandfather May ( Goulburn/Canada/ New York/Sydney/Melbourne) a man with multiple missions, bad choices, over inflated self belief and a blind morality badly affecting his family who with Irish DNA determination far from floundering became remarkable.
My three sons as fathers. 
Now I try to call them to get in first and wish them a happy Father’s Day. I love them dearly. ( The spaces between are not for publication! Life to be mildly understood as circular is poetry, music, improvisation and mark making – and love as an endless active foundation)
Ross Staines – my stepfather in my experience of him always good, loved by our children and us and his 3 daughters. A second marriage for him and my mother.
REMEMBERING
Beyond the days of nappy change
Early school starts
Football sidelines
We walk the edges of their lives now
Disappearing slowly while
Loving painfully, joyfully, frustratingly
Like ours departed
Still live on in the mist.
Clouds of knowing
Signs of love and loving
Holding memories
Now buried to return again
Sometimes with regret
Sometimes with wonder that anything has so wonderfully evolved.
Values passed in lives well lived
Mistaken paradigms of
One percentage iron clad determination
Are slow to heal or heal from fester.
But maybe yes grace lives in silence
In steps or bridges of a human reach
Uncalled or called
Who knows just how to be.
And so with gratitude this day affords
A self reflection.
Taking in the small and shaking love
That in moments of grey mist or dark
Confirms
We
And they
Are
In the end
Somehow
Bound in love
And tethered
Like this.
Peter Breen.
Stewart Breen with his eldest son, Peter Breen Circa 1954, Mornington Peninsula, Victoria .