My Father Who Art In Heaven

 The subject of Fathers Day is sometimes fraught with uncertainty. Not knowing or not connecting with half of your parental unit is a source of trepidation I carry with me from my earliest days as a teacher. "What would your father say?" is a question I have found that can sometimes lead to a different kind of revelation than was intended. 

Everyone has a father. Not everyone has the chance to experience that relationship to its fullest. In that regard, I consider myself very fortunate. I had a chance to get last tag on my father. I had moved out and was on my own and even had a chance to borrow a pair of pants from my old man on my wedding day when the ones I was supposed to wear got left down in town. 

I got married in the meadow below the cabin that I helped him build. The meadow where we played softball in the summers and where a drunken brawl of a volleyball game took place once a year at our family reunion. The pine tree hills surrounding that meadow is where I spent a lot of time dragging fallen timber back to that cabin in the woods where it could be sawed and chopped into fuel to keep ourselves warm and provide heat for cooking on the wood stove. My father ran a Wright reciprocating saw that he kept running night and day on the weekends. This is how he got his nickname: Beaver. 

He didn't have a lot of other pet names. "Dad" was good enough for him. Good enough for my brothers and I to call him that with the periodic needling we might give him by calling by his "real name." He was Donald long before there was another to worry about. He made such an impression that when it was time to go looking for a name for my son, it was already road tested. It was my hope that I would be passing along all those amazing and amusing things that came with that label.

Not the frailties and infidelities that hung around the edges. 

I am older now than my father ever was, and I am not foolish enough to know that for all the adoration I may have poured out in his honor, my father made some awful choices. He was a great dad, and one of the best storytellers I will ever know. He was not always the best husband. He struggled with a past that left him without a father figure of his own so he spent the later years of his life searching for the man he wanted to be. He didn't realize that he had spent his life becoming just that. His wife and children were left with that puzzle. The wreckage he left behind was not inconsiderable, but disrupted the American Dream we all felt we were living. 

I have had some years to forget and forgive. The family he helped build is still mighty and intact, and my wish of raising a namesake for him has worked out rather well. 

I knew my father. And I miss him today.