Both my dads were amazing men. Since this site is dedicated to Patrick and Stephanie, my focus is on those two, but this effort has refreshed and revitalized thoughts of John and Willie. Maybe “refreshed” isn’t the right word since they’re always in my mind, even before Patrick’s suicide.

At any rate, I’ve posted a lot of material that illustrates the breadth of Patrick’s talents and interests. Some of the postings, the conversations, the letters, reflect on his regrets regarding his abandonment of family, but those postings somehow paint him in a positive light too.

Our dad was flawed, no question about it, and I don’t mean to select only the good or noble or artistic aspects of his life. On this site you have probably already seen or heard some of his less proud moments.

More are queued up, and many, many more have to be sorted, reconciled, selected, formatted, staged and posted. In addition I have a lot of stuff he’d sent me electronically over the last two and a half decades, and boxes more of papers, manuscripts, and letters he mailed to me over the last few years, as well as what he left behind for me to deal with.

To help manage the abundance of data, I’ve written code to help identify duplicate files with mismatched content, as well as identical files from all the different drives and memory sticks he left me. That helps a little, but doesn’t much diminish the massive task ahead.

This rambling has gone pretty far afield, as our conversations used to do.

The reason for this posting is  to simply say that you’re going to see more of the good with the bad, the successes with the failures, the things he accomplished with the items left incomplete, unfinished.

Patrick was a real man, a real human being, flawed like us all. In time you’ll see him more fully, warts and all.

Please excuse brevity and typos.
Posted from my mobile device (brand name unimportant).

JP

I’m the son of Patrick of Meadows.