To All the Fathers

One of my favorite pictures of my dad and me was actually taken not far from where I now live. It is one of us at the seawall, Daddy steadying me as I stand next to him on the wall. We both have on baseball caps, and it must have been winter because we both have on coats. Just like my dad, I have my hands in my jeans pockets.

My dad loved me, and although he treated me as a little lady most of the time, he was perfectly willing to let my tomboy side shine through. Being in the fire department, his shift work went from noon to noon the next day, so every third day he was not home in the evenings. He made sure he spent quality time with me, and later on my brother, to make up for that missing time.

Daddy loved to tease and play practical jokes. I guess that was the fireman coming out of him! But his teasing taught me a lot about life. Like, when and where it was okay to poke fun and when it was an absolute no-no. It was perfectly okay when we were playing board games that he would gloat when he was winning, and groan about how we were cheating when he was losing. We laughed a lot when we played a board game called Pollyanna and we captured his piece. His reactions were always pretty dramatic with lots of raucous laughing!

He taught me how to not smoke. I used to go around picking up his cigarette butts and pretend I was smoking just like him. He caught me once, and promptly told me that if I was going to smoke I had to do it "right" and showed me how to really puff ala "weed" style. I was sick very fast and for a long time. But it cured me for a lifetime.

One summer, Daddy came home from work and gathered my brother and me up for a trip to the museum. Mom was at work, and I thought how cool it was to go someplace with just him.

He would take us to the movies. Or when at the drive-in, he would let us sit outside on lawn chairs, with his speaker slightly turned so we could hear. He would play in the river with us, or take us skiing at the lake. He hated it, but he did it because he knew how much we loved it.

He would laugh when my best friend and I were singing loudly to the radio. His two favorites of ours was the way we sang "I Fought the Law and the Law Won" with gusto, and even occasionally sang with us when "Hang on Sloopy" blared across the radio. And my funniest memory came at the supper table one evening as we were eating supper. Dad was unusually quiet one evening, and finally about halfway through, he put down his fork and said "Okay, I wasn't snooping, I was putting something up, and I saw it. I tried seeing if it pulled out chin hairs, or if it straightened curls. But i just can't figure it out. What the heck is it?" He was pantomiming its movement. Mom and I cracked up. It turned out he discovered my eyelash curler!

My dad wasn't big on saying the words "I love you" because I don't think he heard it a lot when he was growing up. But he showed us how much he loved us by being there for us whether we needed him or not.

When I got older, I realized he loved to write little notes. I found them everywhere, each of them saying what he couldn't say out loud. I recently found a spiral notebook in which he had written all sorts of useless trivia, and things that were interesting to him, such has how to draw a perfect circle using arcs and degrees. Or his "ultimate chili recipe" which was revised and replaced several pages later and became known as "Earl's New Ultimate Chili Recipe!" And I still have the note that he wrote and stuck in one of my dresser drawers that simply stated "thank you for loving me."

I would like to take this time to say "Happy Father's Day" to all you dads out there. I wish I could say it one more time to mine here on Earth, but I can't.

I miss you, and I love you, Daddy.