American Icon

At least that’s the title that Walter Isaacson gives in both his soon to be published biography, and in his shorter article published by Time magazine this week. There was ever one sentence that hit me reading this week’s Time magazine article. What Walter found as a way to end his article, I found yet rather disappointing, and another American example of a man failing at fatherhood. Walter ends his article by asking Steve Jobs why he had answered close to 50 interviews and conversations over the past two-years, after Jobs being so private in the public eye. Jobs response,

I wanted my kids to know me… I wasn’t always there for them to know why and to understand what I did.”

Words that are so sincere, and by measures of this world so meaningful, and most likely the honest truth of Mr. Jobs, are nothing of the sort by which I want my children to remember me by. Seriously, a biography, a book, I am to try to understand why my father did what he did through a book, let alone written by another man whom I hardly know myself? I do not have children of my own (yet Lord willing) but I can hardly imagine a point in life which occurs that I place my children aside for work, or other earthly means that I might not raise them without them knowing who their father really was.

Then again… maybe I am reading to far into this quote, maybe I am totally wrong, or maybe I am right on?