Hooray for Dear Old Dad

The ideal father is hardworking, fun-loving, a good provider, understanding, wise, sometimes stern and, above all, inspiring. Yet a century ago, the popular image of the father was less radiant. Groucho Marx observed that in those days, there were many hymns to motherhood, but "nobody ever wrote any song about fathers. Father was the town schlemiel in almost every place."

Father’s Day

. . . . can be any day!

". . .a small boy felt himself lifted from bed. Then he was borne in his father’s arms, with the swiftness of a dream, down the porch steps, out onto the beach.

"‘Watch!’ his father said. And incredibly, as he spoke, one of the stars moved...it flashed across the astonished heavens. And before the wonder of this could fade, another star leaped from its place, and then another, plunging toward the restless sea. ‘What is it?’ the child whispered. ‘Shooting stars,’ his father said. ‘. . . I thought you’d like to see the show.’"

"Decades have passed, but I remember that night still, because I was the fortunate 7-year-old whose father believed that a new experience was more important for a small boy than an unbroken night’s sleep. . . . What I remember is the night the stars fell, the day we rode in a caboose, the time we tried to skin an alligator, the telegraph we made that really worked.

". . . Or the time we explored a cave, and at one point far under ground, snapped off our flashlights and sat there in darkness and silence so profound that it was like being in the void before the beginning of time. After a while Father said, in a whisper, ‘Listen! You can hear the mountain breathing!’

"I remember the books left by my bed that pushed back my horizons and sometimes actually changed my life.

"Did my father deliberately set out to manufacture Father’s Days for his children? I doubt it. . . . I don’t think he was primarily seeking to instruct or inspire or enlighten us. He was satisfying his own curiosity–and letting us in on his discoveries. He was indulging his own sense of wonder–and letting us share it. . . and when this happens, there is no satisfaction in the world quite like it.

"My father had . . . the gift of opening doors for his children, of leading them into areas of splendid newness. This subtle art . . . doesn’t necessarily require a great deal of time. It simply involves doing things more often with our children instead of for them or to them.

"This is the stuff of which real Father’s Days are made . . . and when it happens, there is no satisfaction in the world quite like it."

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