Father and Son Bond - Leif and His Dad Posing

In my last post about Leif, I mentioned that Leif loved the cool hero persona and tried to become that person. As parents, it's hard to know what will become of a child's interests and fancies. Often they are short-lived or phases they go through, and have little or no effect on the child's adult life, but there are other things that, looking back, develop into a lifelong pattern and interest. In Leif's case, three things intersected into a big part of his adult persona; the hero who saved others or the world, the weapons that made that hero larger than life along with the courage to act, and the cool guy with the cool weapons, cars and gadgets. James Bond was in several ways a strong role model.

The interest in James Bond movies was one he shared with his dad, and although Peter never had real guns in our house, they both enjoyed dressing up and posing for photos as "James." This photo was taken when we were living at Fort Sheridan, Illinois north of Chicago on May 23, 1987 when Leif was 12 years old. Little did we know how significant these poses were.