#249 In which our hero writes another Father's Day letter to his dad.

Dear Dad,

It’s Father’s Day again. So far it’s been a pretty low-key event for me. My wife has to work, so I’m home with the girls. They gave me their gift early: a great t-shirt with the girls’ photo on it giving me the thumbs up. “Thumbs up for daddy!” they told me. They also made a gift in day care… a paper popsicle with “Your a great Pop!” written on the stick. I appreciate the gesture, if not the grammar. Wrapped up with it were three freezy-pops, which are now in the freezer. Macey asks every couple of minutes if they’re ready yet. When I tell her they aren’t, she says, “But I can’t wait!”

Y’know, when I write these Father’s Day letters, they always seem so sad. I mean, of course they are, I miss you still; even 15 years after your death. Actually, the sadness seems intensified lately when I think of how my children would have loved being around you, and the joy you would have taken in them. Because they are cute and well-mannered (and as a life-long teacher and principal, you would have especially appreciated that)… but most of all, they’re really funny. Like you were.

So, instead of letting this become another melancholy rumination on how I miss you, I think I’d relate some of the funny things I remember about you.

The first thing that comes to mind is something that now, looking back, I think is hilarious. Even if at the time it was nearly cruel.

We had just watched The Exorcist on TV. I must have been around 10-years-old or so, and really, what the hell were you doing letting me watch a movie like The Exorcist at 10? I remember sitting in your lap and hiding my eyes at the really scary parts. Good Lord, this movie scares me shitless as an adult, I was beside myself as a kid. Anyway, after it was over I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth. And most likely talking to myself, as I often did. So I didn’t hear you sneak up to the (closed) bathroom door, then you suddenly flung it open and screamed like a monster and grabbed me. I fell to the floor in hysterics (and not in a good way). I seem to remember you trying to comfort me afterward, as if you felt bad about scaring me so badly. Which I’m sure you did.

This may have been the defining moment in the evolution of my sense of humor. Because now, as twisted as it seems, I still think scarring a little kid after watching a horrifying movie absolutely hilarious. And, it seems, so did you.

Something else you used to do--and you used to do this all the time--was to come into the house and give me what I thought of as your “principal face.” It was the stern, unsmiling face that said, “Mister, you are in big trouble.” And sometimes, I was. But sometimes, I wasn’t and you were just messing with my mind. Which, again, I find really funny. You came in the door, zapped me with the principal face, and I had a momentary freak-out trying to remember exactly what I did that you found out about, and why I was about to get busted.

Of course, I tend to mess with my kids’ head too. But, I must admit, not with the finesse and skill that you employed.

But really, your sense of humor wasn’t about specific bits--it imbued everything you did. And this, more than anything, is certainly what influenced MY sense of humor. Because I’m funny.

And so are your grandkids.

Thanks for that, Dad.

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#212 In which our hero recounts another Father’s Day passed.

Dear Dad,

Father’s Day this year was pretty low key. My wife made me a wonderful breakfast of frozen hashbrowns and take-out sausage from our favorite hole in the wall restaurant. I mowed the grass. We played with the girls on the swing set. We napped. Dinner was burgers and hotdogs and corn on the cob in the back yard. A pretty good day.

As usually happens, I’ve been thinking about you a lot this past week. While there are countless happy memories, for some reason I’ve really been stuck on, well, not unhappy memories, but little (and not so little) incidents where I screwed up. Things that I never apologized for, but should have. So:

I’m sorry I stole all those quarters from you. But keeping your coin sorter right out in the open, and unlocked, proved too much of a temptation for me. I never took more than a dollar’s worth at a time, and I probably didn’t score more than $20 before Mom caught me one day… but I still feel bad about it. Especially since I just spent the money on gumball machines and (later) video games. I don’t know if you ever noticed, or if Mom ever said anything to you… but you never said anything to me.

I’m sorry I smashed up the car, twice.

I’m sorry I made you worry. Granted, it wasn’t hard to make you worry, but I should have tried a little harder to be where I said I’d be, at the time I said I’d be. I always figured that if I got there within an hour or two of when I said I would, it was fine. Only now do I understand how much a person can worry about their kids when they’re out of sight… and in the days before cell phones that extra hour or two was an unknown gray time with equal possibility of me being irresponsible or dead.

When my high school football coach asked you to join the coaching staff, I’m sorry I was such a jackass about it. You were considerate enough to ask me about it before hand, but given your life-long love of sports, I know you wanted to do it. But all I could imagine was the hard time I’d get from the other players if my daddy was telling them what to do. You were always the best coach for me, I know you would have been outstanding in the role. But you passed, just because your selfish son objected.

When you lay dying at home, I’m sorry I didn’t visit more often. I lived the closest of us kids, but I just didn’t make the effort. I know that you hated anyone making a fuss over you, and in a strange way, I think you were happy that I stayed away. But that’s not why I didn’t come. It was because I was scared to death of you dying, and if I didn’t have to see it, it was less real. So you slowly wasted away from the strong, vibrant man I always knew to a frail, jaundice shell who could bared get out of bed, and I was horrified every time I did come home to see how far you had fallen. I should have come more often, should have spent hours talking to you, learning everything I could from you. There’s so many questions I’d like to ask now, but at 25, I was too young and too stupid to even know what to ask. And now it’s too late.

Finally, when the funeral director asked if the family wanted to be there when they closed the casket, I’m sorry I didn’t step forward. I was the man of the family now, I should have. But it was hard enough seeing your lifeless body laid out, waxy and strange. Funerals are such strange things… they pulled the partition across the room, neatly separating the living from the dead; then closed the casket where no-one could see. Like the closing of a lid would be tougher to take then seeing the corpse of your loved one. My mother and sisters made no move to witness this final closure, and I sat stone-still in the wooden folding chair, afraid to be the only one to move. Just before the partition clicked closed, it flashed through my mind that I should get up and watch, even if no-one else would. But the idea of being alone in the room with your casket, even for a moment, was too much to bare, so I did nothing. I’m sorry I wasn’t stronger.

And, of course, I’m terribly sorry that you never got to meet my wife and daughters. They’re the best; you’d love them. I’m lucky to have them. Just as I was lucky to have you as a dad. I miss you.

Your son,

Craig.

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#197 In which our hero receives a most unexpected gift in the mail.

Something rather cool, and a little spooky, happened to me last week.

But first, a little background. My father had two brothers and two sisters. Everyone is gone now except my Uncle Max (the youngest) and my Aunt Irene (the oldest). I’ve only met Irene a couple of times, she lives out on the west coast and has never been anything but nasty to me anyway. But we used to visit Max all the time.

When my grandfather (that is, my father’s father) was still alive, we’d go to visit fairly often. He lived in a dirty little coal-mining down outside of Pittsburgh, and it took about two hours to drive there. Mostly it was just Dad and me. We’d visit with Pop-pop, who was (by the time I knew him) a shuffling old blind man. But he always had pound cake in the cupboards and orange soda in the fridge, so it was cool. Dad and Pop-pop would sit at the table, Dad telling his father about the latest happenings with his kids, Pop-pop smoking his pipe. I’d often go and play along the nearby canal or watch Pop-pop's gigantic console TV.

My Uncle Max lived in the house directly next door. His son was a couple years older than me, but we’d hang out sometimes. Sometimes Max would come over, but usually we’d visit Pop-pop, then go next door and visit Max and his wife, my Aunt Dee.

When Dad died, Max really made the effort to keep in touch with me. But, I was 24, living on my own, and was busy with lots of other things, like my crappy job and my not-yet-out-of-the-closet live-in girlfriend. So I didn’t do much to reciprocate. I suspect that Max promised Dad that he’d take care of me.

It’s been 14 years since my father died and, sadly, I haven’t done much to keep in touch with Max. And Max is really my only connection with Dad’s side of the family… I don’t talk to any of my cousins on that side. Not out of maliciousness, I just… don’t, y’know?

Anyway, I do send Christmas cards, and that usually ignites some new back and forth communication. Max sent me a letter, with his email address. He complimented me on my family, and told me that my father would be proud of me. He always says that, and at this point I don’t really know if it’s just a platitude, or he really means it. I choose to believe the latter.

I emailed him a month or so ago, and never heard back. So, I did my yearly family duty, I guess.

But last week I got a small package in the mail from Max. In the past he’s sent me articles clipped from the newspaper that he thought I’d find interesting (often about comic books--Max is a big flea-market guy, and he wants me to give him all my comics so he can sell them at a profit; to which I say, um, no thanks). But this was a padded envelope and was surprisingly heavy. I had no idea what it could be. I opened it up, and there was a short letter inside. And something else.

My father’s stop watch.

CRAIG: Enclosed you will find a stopwatch your father gave to me several years ago. I was cleaning some drawers and found it--forgot all about the stopwatch. Took it to a jeweler--it is no good. On the back of the stopwatch you will see your father's name. Thought you would like to have it. Tell you wife we said hello and give Lilly [sic] a hug from her uncle Max.

To see the significance of this stopwatch, you have to understand how important sports were to my father. He managed to go to college on a football scholarship and he was deeply involved with all sorts of sports from that time forward. He refereed middle school football and high school basketball. He ran the clock for high school volleyball games. He umpired baseball of all levels. He announced the high school football games. I spent many cold fall evenings up in the tiny announcer’s booth precariously perched above the bleachers. Long after my dad died they torn down that crappy booth and replaced it with a roomier, better insulated one. And they dedicated it to the memory of my father.

And, he helped time countless track meets with the stopwatch I was now holding in my hand. His name was crudely scratched into the back… probably to assure that it came back right before he lent it out to someone he didn’t know very well.

Strangely enough, I had been considering buying a stopwatch to time the radio spots I’ve been writing recently. I don’t know why I hadn’t just bought one, it’s not like they’re expensive. But I put it off. Now I didn’t have to.

Funny thing, though… even though my Uncle Max said the watch was “no good,” it works perfectly for me.

Thanks Dad.

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#135 In which our hero writes a letter to his dad.

Dear Dad,

In one hour Father’s Day 2006 ends. It was a good, if unremarkable, day. The Scientist had to work, so I spent the morning playing with the girls. Later we grilled steaks and went for a walk. That was pretty much the entire day, expect for the parts where I got the girls laughing so hard that they got the hiccups, or when The Scientist made me laugh that hard. And I got two Dane Cook albums. The Scientist has a remarkable gift of buying me presents that I in no way ever indicated I wanted, but still enjoy quite a bit.

It’s strange… Father’s Day hasn’t really been important to me since you died. That was in 1993, of course, when I was 25. Since then, it’s been a non-holiday for me. If anything, it was a painful reminder that I had lost the ability to just pick up the phone and call you whenever I wanted. That sucked. And it still does.

You always said you were proud of me, but honestly, at 25 I hadn’t accomplished shit. I was working a dead-end customer service job at a newspaper. I was coasting. One of my biggest fears is that you secretly considered me a failure.

I never made this clear when you were alive, but dad, you are my hero. You were born in that little shit-hole town outside of Pittsburgh. You literally lived on the wrong side of the tracks. You also lived next to the canal, which wasn’t exactly luxury waterfront housing. The white trash lived next to the canal. White trash, punks and losers.

Your father, my grandfather, was a rag-man. Your mother died when you were young. At one point, pop-pop couldn’t afford to raise you and your four brothers and sisters, and you all had to go live in an orphanage. But despite that I never heard you say anything bad about your father, and I never saw you treat him with anything but the utmost kindness.

I have a couple faded photos of you as a kid… man, you look like a punk. And apparently you were. God knows you should have started work at a steel mill, drank beer after your shift with the guys, and lived next to the same filthy canal where you were born.

But you beat the odds. Lied about your age and joined the Navy at 15. You were stationed at Pearl Harbor several months before the Japanese attacked. But you retuned from the war intact and went to college. Managed to get a football scholarship to a small PA school. Became a teacher, and eventually, a principal. Moved to a tiny Ohio town, got married and had three girls. Then, seven years after you thought you were done with kids, mom unexpectedly got pregnant again. You finally had a boy.

Y’know, given your hard-knock life, people would have given you a lot of slack if you were a poor father… but you weren’t. You were always there for me, and for my three older sisters. You never missed one of our games or band concerts or plays. I remember that one time when I was 17 and you and mom went on a cruise, a family reunion on mom’s side. I was old enough to leave alone for a week, but it meant you would miss one of my games, basketball, I think. I know you felt terrible about it, and apologized at length. It was the first one of my activities that you ever missed, and it may have been the first of any of your kids’ activities you missed.

People tell me I’m funny, and this is all because of you. You loved to laugh, and loved to tell jokes. Now, I always thought your jokes were corny and dumb. So you didn’t teach me jokes really, but rather how to laugh at things when I could. I could make you laugh sometimes, and that was the greatest thing.

I was strangely proud that you were the principal of one of the elementary schools in town -- even though I never had you as a student myself. Your school let out an hour later than the high school did, and sometimes I would drive up to your school and just hang out with you after I was done for the day. I’ll never forget how you could walk into a gym packed with kids waiting for their buses -- loud, spastic, out of control kids -- and immediately quiet them down. But the thing is, you wouldn’t say a word… you’d wait until one kid noticed you, then he’d tell his buddy, and within moments, word spread that you were in the room and it would be silent. With just a look, you transformed 400 rambunctious kids into neat and ordered lines of perfect students.

“How do you do that?” I asked. You would just smile and say, “They know I’m not kidding around.”

This apparent fear that kids had of you always confused me. When the three elementary schools fed into the one high school in town, the other kids quickly figured out that I was your son. “Does he beat you at home?” I was asked once. Many times I’d hear, “Your dad gave me a serious whipping at school!” This, of course, when spanking was still acceptable. I would always ask, “Did you deserve it?” And the answer was always, “Yeah, pretty much.” Other kids seemed to have a little fear of you, but also a lot of respect. Kids know when an adult is fair or not, and you were always fair.

I was never afraid of you… not that you would beat me, that is. But I was afraid of disappointing you. And I know I did on a couple of occasions. I only hope that you weren’t disappointed in me when you died.

Used to be that when the subject of religion came up, I would say that I didn’t really believe in God or any of that stuff, but I didn’t like to say that out loud, just in case I was wrong. But I have a different attitude now. I want to believe -- I need to believe -- that you can see me, even now.

Because dad, I’ve done something with my life. I have a career, and I’m really good at it. I’ve achieved great things with the hobbies in my life. I have a wonderful wife that you would really like. I try hard not to rail about how unfair it is that you’re gone, but it hits me hard when I think of you not being able to meet my wife. I can almost hear the long discussions you’d have about science and the cancer that eventually killed you. You would have loved her.

And, of course, I have two wonderful little kids who will never know their grandfather. That may be the worst part of this all. However, both of my girls have a little patch on their heads where the hair grows white. Just like you did. I’m not one to believe in guardian angels or the like… but maybe, just maybe, this is a sign that you are looking out over my girls. I’ll let down my well-developed sense of skepticism and sarcasm just this once to believe that.

I miss you dad. I miss talking to you for hours on the phone. I miss the letters you wrote. Because God knows you were the King Champion of letter writers. To this day I tell people that you wrote me every week I was in college, and that each letter as at least eight to twelve pages long. Do you know that I threw all those letters away? They were just dispatches from the homefront, how the boy’s football team was doing, what was going on at the park. Now I wish I had saved them. Every banal word of them.

I know you loved me, but you rarely said it. I’m not sure why, it was probably just a generational thing. Instead, you would write me letters. Even before I left for college, you’d write down your feelings and slip the letter into my sock drawer. I’d read them, but we’d never really talk about it. Looking back it seems like an odd situation, but I think the key here is that you told me that you loved me, even if it was in a secret letter. Now, I wish I had told you that I loved you a little more often.

So it seems fitting that I’d immortalize you in the same fashion -- a letter. The only difference now, of course, is that I no longer have the option of saying “I love you” to your face.

I hope you can read this, dad. I hope you can see me. And I hope that you know, beyond all space and time and distance, that I love you very much, and I miss you very much.

Your son,

Craig.