Father’s Day

I was alone this Father’s Day. Not because I was forgotten, or ignored, or rejected. It was a gift. I celebrated with my wife and children a few nights earlier. We had a wonderful time. I looked across the restaurant table at my kids and basked in how much we were enjoying each other and that they had come to celebrate me. How did I ever get here?

My wife asked me how I would like to spend my Father’s Day. Since it was just the two of us, and it was a stormy day, I told her I would like to spend the entire afternoon reading the book my daughter had given me- Cameron Crowe’s memoir “Uncool”, the stories of his early days of Rock and Roll journalism,

I laid out a stack of early 70’s Rock and Roll albums: The Who’s “Quadrophenia”, Little Feat’s “Waiting on Columbus”, Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story”, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run”, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Pronounced”, Todd Rundgren’s “Something /Anything,” and Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti”.

Cameron says in his terrific book, “I always felt that a favorite song has a mind of its own. It arrives just when you need it, and that it remains for the rest of time. Every time you hear the song, you can remember the feeling, like you’re reading a diary entry. It’s one of music’s greatest gifts.”

I began reading the stories of Cameron traveling with and interviewing these bands – bands I had spent so much of my time with as a Freshman and Sophomore in college. The songs from the record player joined in, sending me into a reverie of those long-ago days. As I listened to Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me”, I remembered studying at the University of Alabama student Union with that song playing over their sound system.

Lynard Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” sent my mind back to a scene of my wife and me dancing in our tiny one-bedroom apartment, where we were pregnant and soon to be young parents barely out of our teens.

While reading about and listening to the bands of my entry into adulthood, I thought how unprepared I was for being a father and a husband, and adulthood in general.

I was always leery of adults. They seemed to be made of something else. They possessed something I did not have, and deep down suspected that I never would.

As a kid, I watched my Dad put on a three-piece suit every morning, leave the house, and not return until it was dark. What do these adults do all day long?

I had a friend in Junior High who could walk up to any adult and have a conversation as if he were just another one of his friends. I wondered, “How does he do that?” I could not do that—adults were a mystery I could not solve and so avoided them altogether if I could.

As a twenty year old, married, and getting ready to be a father, I still don’t feel comfortable around grown-ups. I had the responsibilities of being an adult thrust upon me ( as if I had nothing to do with it) well before I was one.

When our first child was being delivered, I was relegated to the hallway outside. I paced up and down the halls of the hospital, listening to the painful moans and cries coming from the various delivery rooms. I was full of fear and doubt about whether I would be up to the task of fatherhood. I knew I was not prepared.

There were grown-up activities that I never felt comfortable with. My Dad invited me to his Rotary Club meeting when we were visiting my family. It was like being in a science fiction movie. The men were all acting the same. polite but distant, smiling at me like they had a secret that I was not ready for.

Golf was a game for adult men. Even though I played as a teenager with my Dad and some of my friends, when I looked at the Golf culture in general, it was adult men who followed specific rules and did things in certain ways and talked about certain things that did not interest me or that I did not even understand. I have avoided the golf game my whole life, not because I don’t like hitting the ball, but I am afraid I won’t measure up to being an adult on the fairway or the green.

Out of necessity, I learned to do adult stuff- get to work on time, do my job, pay my bills, take the kids to games or classes, go to Church with the family on Sunday- but never feeling like an adult. I felt like a kid playing at being a Dad. I had a long way to go to being the Father that I imagine my Dad was, and even my peers were.

I have read from a variety of sources that the first half of life is all about finding your place, your role, achieving certain things, getting a stable foothold on life, and discovering who you are. The second half of life is about sharing who you are with those coming up behind you.

I have been slow to the game of Fatherhood. I have spent about three-quarters of my life trying to grow up and find my place as a father. In those years , I have made many sins of omission and commission. I have missed opportunities to be an influence. I had not fully entered into the mysterious quality of fatherhood that protects, sustains, and advances society.

Today, I am so pleased to accept that I have grown into being an older father –I am more and more referred to by younger men as “Pops”, “Gramps” “Old Timer”.

I have been slow to realize that the secret to being a mature adult, and a good father, is to no longer be concerned about my future, my comfort, my position, my reputation, or what others think of me- but my concerns are turning almost exclusively to those around me.

There is a well-known parable in the Bible of the “Prodigal” son. We most often think of the son in this story who squandered his inheritance at great expense to the Father. What I am thinking of, (as I listen to Led Zeplin’s “Kashmir”), is that I have been destined to live through the prodigal son stage and enter into the “Prodigal” father stage—Prodigal in the sense of lavish, extravagant giving that does not consider the cost. It is a fatherhood that can’t wait for the opportunity to give. It comes from understanding that this is what I was born for, and that there are few joys in life that can compare with living out my role as a father.

When I use the word Father, I am also thinking of the universal in the sense of bringing helping call forth in others what they do not know they have or who they are. I am thinking of the ancient tradition that seem to be losing; of the elders of society not so much giving advice, but sharing perspective from personal experience. I am thinking of mentoring, teaching, sharing, and giving.

There is a danger of ageism today- of relegating senior men and women to the sidelines as irrelevant, when in fact they are gatekeepers of the future , pointing those coming up from behind to those intangible values and commodities of living that modern society has forgotten. They continue on as Fathers and mothers. Their role is always there.

It has taken most of my life to become a father and to relish it. I hope I continue becoming one. Better late than never.