Up Where the Air is Clear
A few thoughts on Father's Day, and my dad in particular
I don’t like Father’s Day as a holiday, or really most hallmark holidays in general. I don’t go so far as to ignore them (or to invent alternative holidays), but my general sense is that if the only day you acknowledge your parent or your partner each year is on a retail holiday, you’ve generally missed the point of why those people are worth honoring. These days also suggest prescriptively gendered tracks on what affection looks like—on Valentine’s Day, that women can receive flowers but not give them, or on Mother’s Day, that what moms really want is keepsake signs and (of course) candles. But perhaps my biggest problem with these holidays is they create a kind of flattened heroism around what a good partner or parent is supposed to be. The origins of Father’s Day came a decade after the establishment of Mother’s Day, attempting to represent a more intimate bond between father and children comparable to that of the idealized role of the mother in Victorian society, and to, as Calvin Coolidge put it in his declaration establishing the day, “impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations."
My father never had any confusion about his obligations as a parent—in fact, I think he relished them, and he certainly relished Father’s Day. He liked celebrations, silly cards, goofy puns and jokes, and any special event to be commemorated with a big breakfast or a run down to the ice cream shop. From what I can know (which is pretty selective), he loved being a dad, going to soccer practices and school plays, picking us up at school, taking us to Red Sox l games (to which I would bring a book, much to his silent chagrin), helping my sister learn to ride her bike. He also loved a lot of the dad things that appear on listicles for Father’s Day presents—great historical monographs, new wallets and ties, bobbleheads of his favorite baseball players.
He was also endlessly patient, especially when shepherding me through the ups and downs of adolescence, those years in which I spent less and less time seeking out my parents’ attention. He waited for hours to pick me up from play practices (which I dragged out without notification, soaking up time with friends and crushes rather than swiftly heading out to the car), and only mildly complained about the delay. When I crashed my first car on the way to school one morning, he picked me up from the crash site and drove me to the school nurse, as I shivered from post-crash adrenaline in the seat beside him. He endured countless eye rolls, histrionic meltdowns, and snarky dismissals of invitations to hang out at home when I came home on breaks from college, preferring to drive to my boyfriend’s house to spend the night (as his parents didn’t mind it so much when I slept over).
I didn’t think about everything he did to make our life possible. How he reorganized his work schedule around our after-school activities so he could be present at dinnertime and bedtime and, only once we’d squired ourselves away in our bedrooms, go up to his office and work for a few more hours. How many weekends he and my mom had structured their fun around us, rather than around their own interests. How many times they agreed not to squabble or argue in front of us. How willing he was to read to me and play with me as a child, put me on his shoulders, prioritize my happiness and safety over his own.
Before I became a parent, I never fully understood how much of parenthood is self-sacrifice, a total reframing of what a day well-spent can look like. How your daily geography is remade around playgrounds and family-friendly restaurants and easy parking spots. How ready you must be to get down to a child’s level and hug them for an indefinite, unlimited period of time. How little you learn to care about sticky hands and dirty faces getting smashed up against your own. How often you have to temper your own opinions and listen rather than speak, especially if you want your kid to feel deeply, genuinely heard. Especially when a squabble would ensue between family members, my dad was always the one ready to deescalate, to help us go to our separate corners and reassess whether a fight was really necessary. I find myself channeling him so often now, and wishing so terribly that he was still here telling me how to do it.
The journalist David Carr once said, “When memory is called to answer, it often answers back with deception.” I can’t completely trust my memories of my father, or really any family memories, not because I doubt their truth—he almost definitely was all these things—but because I know I wasn’t paying enough attention to observe them in the first place. Perhaps it’s just the way it is with teenagers, that old saying of you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, but I think I spent much of my adolescence wishing that my father was somehow less present. Less ready to attend to my needs, less solicitous of my impression, less available or invested in my emotional inner life. My sharpest memory of my father from my high school years is my own dismissal of him during our morning rides to the commuter rail; him asking me what was going on at school, and my muttering (like so many sullen teenagers), “Nothing, OK? Now just leave me alone.” Had I known that my late teen years would be the last period where I formed memories of him, I would have made them more intentionally. Been more appreciative of how much he wanted to learn who I was, what I thought, what I wanted to say.
Now with my own daughter, I think about how she is to have two amazing granddads—my wonderful stepdad and father-in-law—in her life, and especially how lucky she is to have her dad, someone willing to be goofy but also careful with her, who can pretend to be a fearsome monster on the playground but will always be ready with a band-aid and a hug when she falls down. My husband has always had latent “dad energy,” an abundance of corny jokes and silly voices just waiting for an audience, and I’m glad that our kid gives him a great excuse to put it to good use. But I didn’t also realize that he had what my dad had as well: a foundational stability that could make my daughter feel absolutely certain that she was safe and loved no matter what was going on. Shoulders on which she could ride and see the world even while she was still small. To fly a kite with her, and to let her feed the birds.
Recommendation: My dad didn’t watch much reality TV—it wasn’t so popular by the time he died—but he would have loved Jury Duty, a show that gives me exactly as much as reality as I can actually take. Especially if you’re a fan of mockumentaries like Best in Show, and the absolutely astonishing work of improv actors, I can’t recommend this enough.
The Perfect Bite: After taking my kid to the Boston Children’s Museum on Saturday, we had a great lunch at The Smoke Shop, with a smattering of different BBQ meats, and of course, some brisket burnt ends. I try to explain to people why these are so delicious (the caramelization? the char? the brisket prep itself?) and almost never succeed. It’s also quite difficult to get really good barbecue in New England (especially once you’ve tasted it in Kansas City or Mississippi), so when you find it, snatch it up.
Cooked & Consumed: When food scholar friends come over for dinner, you really want to show off your garden. So we made two things this week that really stunned: first, a batch of mint simple syrup from the overflowing planter in the front yard, which served as the basis for bright green mojitos (and mint sodas for the non-imbibing). Second, the garlic that we planted last spring is finally shooting up its scapes, so we made a batch of garlic scape pesto (made with almonds, don’t shoot me). Tossed with wide sauceable noodles and enjoyed outside on a rare rain-free evening, it was absolutely delicious.