Out of the ordinary

I wish my father were here. 

I miss him. Not just on Father's Day, of course, but his absence today looms large.

He wasn't a Hero ... or The Best Dad Ever. He couldn't be categorized by a card. He was just a guy who loved his kids and his grandkids and did his best for the family.

A part of me loved him most for the things he didn't get exactly right.

The indelible moments.

The hour-long trip into the snowy woods to find the perfect Christmas tree, only to realize the trip back would mean another hour's trek dragging the quarry with a half-frozen toddler on top.

The eighth birthday party, held at the Snow Dock in Albany watching the garbage barge float past, when it turned out the bowling alley was closed.

He wasn't perfect but he was enthusiastic. Pride wasn't his motive.

He rarely took the easy path. A David fighting Goliaths. 

He hummed the music of Aaron Copland. He loved the poems of Robert Frost. He had strong feelings about politics and prose. He was anxious, but he didn't worry. He loved my mother. He hated eggs.

He would have grand tutorials around the operation of his electric train set, but I don't think he ever instructed us on the commodified evils of leaving the lights on in a room we'd vacated. He'd just shut them off.

He had an impish laugh, too. The kind of laugh that started silently and wracked his slender body until it took full control. He often found humor at his own expense, but he found amazement everywhere else.

"Did I ever tell you ...." is how he began most of his stories.

About how the old neighborhood looked. How he met my mother. What shenanigans his pals at work had gotten up to. What the grandkids had said last week that made him "laugh like a fool."

Of course, he had told them all before, but there was something about his voice that always made me want to hear them again. I could picture the tale as though it were flickering behind him on a movie screen.

Nothing out of the ordinary. 

It doesn't really surprise me that, according to history, this American day of honoring dads was ingrained by a daughter who simply admired her dad.

It also doesn't surprise me that the sentiment felt so embarrassing that it took a while for the nation to catch on.

Fatherhood, according to long understood lore, was more of a noun than a verb.

My father often remarked that he only found the true joy of fatherhood later, as retirement gave him time to spend with his grandchildren. Toting them around to swim classes or ballet performances. Letting them play with the model trains before they'd even learned the basics.

"Did I ever tell you how when you were little I used to go to work before you woke up and get home after you'd fallen asleep? You'd cry when you saw me on weekends because I was a stranger.

"I'm glad things are different now."