Ol' Tom and Laura, 2008 by Tom Kelly. This book of Tom and Laura stories is a gift to dads and moms who have had the delight to raise their children in the outdoors. The selections are from Tom Kelly's previous books. Tom had this to say in the 2008 end pages.
" The over-layered montage on the dust jacket shows what has become of the two people featured in the stories in this book.
The little girl in the yellow dress, who at the time the picture was taken was a first class pickup man, is now a vice president of marketing, has gained eighty pounds..all the way up to a hundred and ten...and has children of her own. She has been mellowed by time, rather than ravaged.
The years have not been as kind to the brand new Lt. Col. of Artillery you see in the first photo. A situation that was only to be expected since he was much further down the road than the little girl when the first picture was taken. He has developed a rather interesting collection of blotches, wrinkles, and blemishes, mostly caused by continued exposure to sun and weather. As a matter of fact, he is beginning to look as if he has a hole in the bedroom wall and sleeps with his head outdoors all the time.
He no longer commands a battalion either, and exercises only partial supervision of a very elderly black Larador retriever who is wholly untrained.
The one thin that is not visible in either picture is the fact that the two people are still friends.
Not simply father and daughter, but friends.
Friendship is a condition rarely existing between fathers and daughters in the world today because the relationship between those two classes is usually composed of a mixture of exasperation and strained forbearance, loosely cemented together by a sense of obligatory duty.
Since the present situation with my daughter is a far cry from the relationship I had with my own parents, it is obvious that the present relationship is due to thought processes of the child, rather than those of the parent. To put it in the vernacular of the upper gulf coast,
"That there is one good kid."
There is a quotation from a play written by Mrs. Mary Shakespeare's third child Billy, that covers the matter adequately,
" Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale, her infinite variety."
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