the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
(From: “Father” in Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser)
In an article entitled, “Father’s Day: Even the cards are different,” which appeared in a 2008 edition of the San Diego Union Tribune, reporter Jenifer Godwin wrote:
Moms and dads are more equal parenting partners than ever before, with studies showing men do far more housework and spend more time with their children than previous generations.
Yet Father’s Day still doesn’t inspire the same need to bestow sentimental cards, gifts and dinners out as Mother’s Day.
Godwin cited a number of statistics to show the contrast between how we celebrate mothers and fathers. More cards are sent to mothers on Mother’s Day and more money spent on mothers’ gifts. In fact, Father’s Day wasn’t an official holiday until 1972, when then president, Richard Nixon made it official, over a half century after the designation of an official Mother’s Day.
Father’s Day was, by comparison to Mother’s Day, didn’t garner the same attention when I was a kid, but happily, things have changed. In fact, parenting assumptions were beginning to change as I reared my own children, but the shift is most obvious today, as I witness the shared partnership of child-rearing responsibility between my daughters and their husbands.
When I was young, my mother was primarily responsible for the day-to-day upbringing of my siblings and me. My father wasn’t as involved, but we felt his influence in so many ways. He was an affectionate, fun-loving man and, unlike our mother, soft-hearted and easy-going, I often stopped by his store on our way home from school to beg for an after-school treat, my allowance already depleted. More than a few times, he’d grin as he rattled the change in his pocket, then, winking at his assistant say, “Hey Kid…how about I come with you?” We spent many afternoons sitting together at the drugstore counter across the street, Dad with a cup of black coffee, and me with a coca cola.
He wasn’t hard on us kids,
never struck us…
He used to sing in the car
bought us root beers along the road.
He loved us with his deeds.
(From: “A Father’s Pain,” in A River Remains by Larry Smith)
He was the father whose feet I stood upon as he danced around the living room to his favorite Glen Miller or Benny Goodman tunes, who taught me how to pitch a baseball and throw a football even as my mother wished I’d choose more feminine activities. As man raised by a wonderful cook, I sought to please him with clumsy attempts at making the blackberry pies he loved so much. At first, my creations bordered on inedible, often made with too much flour and not nearly enough sugar. But it hardly mattered. Dad would eat an ample slice; flash me a big smile and say, “This might be the best blackberry pie I’ve ever tasted.”
Three months after his diagnosis of lung cancer, my father died on Thanksgiving Day, 1992. I wasn’t ready to let him go, and in the wake of his death, our family devastated, the emptiness I felt lingered for months. I’m sure that my father influenced my decision to begin my expressive writing groups for cancer survivors a few years later. He was a storyteller, and all my life, he spun tales of his childhood, filling our heads and hearts with a love of story. In the last weeks of his life, those stories, told as I sat by his side in the family room, became all the more precious. On the afternoon the last day of his life, he struggled to get out of bed, sit at the table and share in his family’s traditions, and asking, as he had for all the years I remembered, for a second slice of pie.
I miss my father even now, and although I’m celebrating other fathers in my life today– husband, sons-in-law and family friends—I’ll think of him. His easy smile, the laughter, his legacy of story. Stories I still remember; ones I have told and re-told to my daughters and will tell to my grandchildren. “Death steals everything except our stories,” Jim Harrison wrote in his poem, “Larson’s Holstein Bull.” It’s the part of my father’s legacy I treasure most—he may have died too soon, but his stories are the one thing that cancer could never take away.
Why not write about your father or grandfather—or, perhaps, someone who was like a father to you? The memories of our fathers, whether fond or complicated, are full of stories. Write one. And to all the fathers in our lives, Happy Father’s Day.