I'm usually so focused on myself and how I'm dealing with all my father baggage—or my kids, and how they'll deal with all their father baggage—that I don't often stop and think about what my own dad might have thought about his own enterprise of fatherhood. 

He was a smart guy. He must have asked himself what he was passing on to his children. In the photograph below with me in his arms, might he have been thinking about that? If this were a still from a movie I'd directed, I would have just told the actor playing the goateed man that the following was going on in his mind:

You love your son, and love that your son loves you. But you're afraid that, when he grows up enough to realize who and what you are, he won't love you anymore. 

Yeah, that's what I'd say. In the next photograph, I'd tell the actor playing the father that he was thinking of the way both of us could be panthers, free and fierce and wild, if only for the curse that kept us caged. 

What would I tell the actor playing me? Nothing. I don't have to, because he knows his role to perfection already. Check out the look on his face.