Happy Father's Day

I know this is a week late, but happy father's day to all friends and family.  Especially to Jake and to Dave...the fathers of our grandchildren.

Over the past few days, I've been thinking about what it means to be a father and of course thinking about my father.   We only get one in our lives.   And we tend to forget the importance of the one we get.  I've been trying to think back to the earliest memories that still remain in my tired, old brain.  Instead of seeing my father through the my adult eyes, I'd like to see him again through the eyes that were mine as a child.  Children's eyes, I think, are able to see the world much more clearly, more truthfully.  They are not clouded by the silliness of the adult world.

I remember being small and sneaking into my mom and dad's bedroom.  I remember playing with the spare change in the glass bowl in the small wheelbarrow-shaped nick-knack on the dresser.  I remember using their big, two-person mattress as a trampoline.  (Our mattresses, as kids, were much smaller and much less effective trampolines.)

I remember opening the closet and stepping into my dad's shoes.  Quite vividly I remember how they seemed so huge and how my feet - maybe four-year-old feet - couldn't fill them enough to lift them off the floor.  My father was a giant.  Or so it seemed.

By all accounts I was a mommy's boy.   She was with us kids 24 by 7, whereas dad would be gone to work most of the day.  His arrival in the evening was celebrated with the great feast of supper time.  That doesn't mean dad was less significant than mom.....only more mysterious.  A man who lived part of the day within the family, and lived the other part of the day in the great mysterious world that lies beyond the front door of a four-year-old's house. 

On week-ends my dad did magical things such as mowing the lawn or shovelling snow or planting the garden or working on the house.   He always welcomed a tag-along.  In my earliest memories, we were a family of three kids...and then three became four ...and then five.  Then, just before I went to college, we became six.   He always found a way for each of us to do the same things as he did, but in miniature....whether mowing with a toy lawn mower or planting a few seeds in our own corner of the garden.

I remember when my father helped my sister plant a maple seed, then nurture it to a sapling, and then plant the sapling in the yard of our house in Loogootee.   I remember the great tragedy when he accidentally ran over that sapling with the lawn mower.

I remember going with him to inspect the new house in Washington when it was still being built, still just a frame of sticks, and walking across the 2 by 12 plank to get into doorway.  He moved the family into the half-finished house in 1966 and never stopped working on it for 30 years.  In retrospect, that home was a magical place to grow up.

I remember Saturday mornings in the summer mixing and pouring concrete and Saturday mornings in the winter finishing off the interior of the upstairs bedrooms. I remember riding to the lumber yard in the old International pick-up truck with my father singing silly songs.  "Moses was a carpenter who stumbled in the dark.  Came across a hammer and he built himself and ark."

Later, I remember clearing fence rows.  Always, I remember being awestruck at how he could keep working long after my arms and legs take no more.

I remember shelling peas and lima beans while watching TV in the summer evenings.  Hot summer evenings in a house that had no air-conditioning.  And I remember each evening included a family dinner in which my mother and father would talk and joke and discuss the world ...and how all of us kids would be allowed to participate as equals in those conversations.  I remember being sent to bed and hearing mom and dad talk while they were watching the late shows on TV and then hearing them continue talking after they went to bed.   I never went to bed afraid that my mom and dad would get divorced. Never. Ever.

Every man has ambitions, desires, disappointments, disillusionment, weaknesses, and personal demons.  It's part of life. 

Supposedly great men - the authors and artists and the achievers - weave these failings into their autobiographies as is they were no more than plot twists.  You know the ones.  "He was a great movie star....who was married seven times".  "He was the greatest baseball player of all time.. even though he was a drunk who never came home to his family."  "He was a self-made multi-millionaire and a business genius...who divorced and married a 25 year-old when he was 60."

I'm sure my father is not a perfect man.  But what makes him great is that whatever ambitions and disappointments and demons he had were known only to him.  All we knew in our family was the steady strength and patience and faith and unshakable character and unconditional love of a humble man.

What amazes me more, when I look at my father through the eyes of my childhood, is that I can see now that he was just a kid.  We have some videos made from the old home movies.  In them, mom and dad are skinny, awkward and so so very young.  Barely in their twenties in some of them.  Not thirty when I turned five years old.  These were not yet people with the wisdom of old age.  They were kids.  How did they do it?  Where, if not from a soul blessed by God, does character like theirs come from?

I wince now when I think about the stupid and inconsiderate things I did as a child or the things I did when teenage years magnified that stupidity and inconsiderateness.

I smile a little every time I hear my father's voice coming out of my mouth or when I see his mannerisms in the things that I do.  I will forever celebrate those parts of him that are in me...to atone for my stupidity and disrespect.  And because I love him and love the thought of any small part of him that I might have in me.

And I keep thinking about how huge my dad's shoes felt when I was a four-year-old playing in his closet.   Now that I'm past the age of fifty those shoes still feel huge and impossible to fill .  My father is a giant.  Or so it seems to me.