Happy Father’s Day!
[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]
It’s Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.
Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.
Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.
Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.
There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.
THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
When on Father’s Day I think of my sons–and daughters–I think of John Ciardi’s poem “Two Poems for Benn”, which ends
“. . . . Little boy, little boy,
I feel an absence beginning. You are touched already
by the shape of what you will be:
the stranger I go to my grave for and give my house to
as once it came from a stranger stopped in love
to cry: ‘My son! My son! I am well traded!'”
If I may let me offer a paen to my father, gone now these 24 years.
My father was a machinist and not formally educated beyond high school except for a couple of night-school trade courses but he was a wellspring of common sense. He worked mostly 2nd turn and as I grew older I used to stay up until he returned home around midnight to spend an hour or so with him. We would talk about all sorts of things and today one particular story sticks vividly in my mind.
He told me once of having a particularly vehement argument with one of his co-workers. The following night he told me of the resolution. He went to work and saw the fellow he had argued with the day before and said hello and talked to him about several technical things. Another machinist asked my dad “How can you say ‘Hi” and talk to this guy after yesterday’s argument?” My father responded “I argued with him yesterday. Today, tomorrow and from now on I have to work with him.”
This was one of the important life-lessons that he taught his family by living example. It may not be pleasant to argue but from time to time it happens, and no matter how vitriolic the argument might be, you put it behind you and move on. A disagreement made his co-worker no less his co-worker; a disagreement with our father made us no less his sons. His deep and abiding love and respect for us was, we hope, returned by us to him. He was not just our father, he was a good and trusted friend.
May God bless him and his wisdom and all such fathers on this Father’s Day.
Typo, sorry: “paean”
T
A great memory of wisdom.
I was fortunate to have strong and loving men in my young life. Maybe I could wish they had been more vocal, but the positive side of the ledger over whelms any negatives.
Fortunately, I never had reason to question the love. And communications is a two way street. As I told my grandchildren not so long ago, you will never look back and think that you told the ones you love how much they mean to you too often.
That poem has a grim NE feel to it.