Father's Day 2014

I am acutely aware that today is Father's Day.  Or as I have been thinking about it in previous years just another day.

This morning though I woke up with a yearning so deep and a desire so strong to see and hear and touch his face, to sit as adults and swap stories the way we did/do with mom so that we could laugh and know each other as adults.  I want him to be proud of me.  I want to know he loved me.

I no more than had that thought when I felt, what I think of, as an energetic emotional hug.  And I knew all those things were true and that not having had them did not matter.  He knew.  He is proud.  He loves me.  So instead of missing him this Father's Day, I want to celebrate a life.

My da was a ghost in my life, passing through on Sunday afternoon for dinner and staying through the evening asleep in his recliner pretending to watch Mule Train.  He worked third shift and slept days.  After work he did independent contractor work as a painter.  Stillness for him was impossible.  If he was awake, he was working.  I know my work ethic comes in a direct line hand to hand from him.  It doesn't matter what I am doing, I need to do my best and be proud in the end of the job I have done.

"I don't care what you do honey.  Be a ditch digger.  But be the best damn ditch digger you can." -HLDusing

I think that's why I love this song by Jimmy Buffet.  It reminds me of my dad in every way.

My dad wanted to be a doctor, but he dropped out of high school and never went back.  He valued education for us, perhaps more for his sons than his daughter.  But still.  It was important.  THE war came and he served in the European theater instead.  The more I learn about WWII, the more I feel I understand him.  His pride in my oldest brother when he fulfilled that doctor dream was button-popping.

What my dad became to the outside world was a factory worker.  What he was to me was an artist.  There was no shade of paint he couldn't make, no living room he couldn't rearrange to perfection, no amount of color or pattern ever threw him.  It is from him that my artistic nature comes.  It's great combo'd up with RM's craftiness and lexophilia .  When I look around, my youngest brother got a whalloping dose of that artistic inclination from dad.  In fact, he is a newer improved version of my dad.  Da 2.0.  Among my most precious memories are a summer I spent working with him painting, in particular striping parking lots.  I had a bitchin' tan from being outside and the fine mist of traffic yellow paint gave my skin a certain sparkle that summer.  Traffic yellow remains one of my favorite colors.  I remember Frisch's Big Boy's in paper wrappers and sitting on the curb in the shade not talking while we wolfed them down.  The ability to be OK in silent mode is a people trait I require.  I think it harks back to these afternoons, sprawled out in the shade staring at sky companionably in silence.    I remember his silence that said so much to me on those afternoons.

Hank, that's my dad consider yourself introduced, was also something of a mechanical carpentrical wizard.  He finished the entire upstairs of the house where I grew up from the studs out.  I did not inherit this in any way.  Nope, Phil aka younger brother, got that too.  I can still remember walking into his newly built and moved into home to find the counters all ripped off because he didn't like the way they were mitred.  Thing is, when he was done, they were much better.  Mini-Hank.  But I recognize that I did get some version of this, a desire to know and understand how things work, how they go together.

Growing up, even though I loved him, I would have traded him for the fun dad down the street, the one who played pickle and tag with us.  I would have traded him for young one across the street who had lots of energy and laughed a lot.  I would have traded him for one that showed up at sports or dances.  I would have traded him for one who talked to his daughters.  Later, I would have traded him for a sober one.  I would have traded him for a case quarter on most days.

As a grown up, I see him in me and they are the better parts and I wouldn't trade him for anything. As is.