I’ve always wondered if fathers think every day should be Father’s Day like mothers think every day is Mother’s Day. Never being one for strict gender roles and an ardent believer that parenting is a group effort, I’ll go out on a limb and say that, yes, every day should be Father’s Day.
Perhaps it would be easier to adjust our mindset to make every day Love and Appreciate Everyone Day. Novel, I know.
How do you thank a man for a lifetime of support on a single day? How do I gather up the thousands of things I’ve learned from him over the years and condense them into a greeting card handed to him after church? It seems appropriate that I should sit at my father’s feet and worship him day in and day out until death do us part. Not that he would sit still long enough for that, but still.
I was blessed with a good father. I have taken him for granted for a variety of juvenile reasons, but I have never lost sight of how lucky I am to have a good father, both now and in the past. As we both get older, our seemingly eternal life together has shortened to perhaps only a few days or a few years, maybe only a decade or two left. Only God knows, but there is considerably less time now than ever before.
It feels perfectly natural at this juncture to make sure I’m making the most of my remaining time with my father. Two months ago, my sister and I went to Washington DC with Dad and had an experience we will never, ever forget. We spent five days with Dad, sightseeing and touring the city a breakneck speed, just the three of us, in order to fulfill an item on our collective bucket list.
More important than memories, though, is making sure I’ve learned everything there is to know from my father and passing it on to my children and they to theirs. This is the only way I know to repay him for his lifetime of kindness and education, to make sure the best of everything in him stays in the family for generations to come.
How lucky the future is, too! My father is my hero. We share a variety of hobbies – politics, reading, Bison football, good hamburgers, current events, and thrift store shopping, but I like it best to just watch him, to see the resigned crease in his forehead in the face of setback and tragedy, his battle-scarred hands after a hard day of work, his presumptive laughter over life’s ironies, the glint in his eyes when he’s got an idea, the cheerful jolt his whole body makes when it actually works, his quiet contentment to follow, his unabashed use of logic. These are the things a daughter needs to see to form herself as the years go by, to be noble enough for generations behind her.
And so this Father’s Day, to my father who I cannot repay in kind, I leave with a poem.
To Her Father with Some Verses
by Anne Bradstreet
Most truly honoured, and as truly dear,
If worth in me or ought I do appear,
Who can of right better demand the same
Than may your worthy self from whom it came?
The principal might yield a greater sum,
Yet handled ill, amounts but to this crumb;
My stock’s so small I know not how to pay,
My bond remains in force unto this day;
Yet for part payment take this simple mite,
Where nothing’s to be had, kings loose their right.
Such is my debt I may not say forgive,
But as I can, I’ll pay it while I live;
Such is my bond, none can discharge but I,
Yet paying is not paid until I die.
Happy Father’s Day to all the great men out there who are raising children, both little and big.
