Father's Day

This Father's Day started in the early morning.

The youngest had a bad dream. She first woke her mother and then me.

Downstairs, I warmed up yesterday's coffee before sitting in the room I call a library, polishing a sermon that wasn’t, and never will be, done.

More feet stirred. And like the sunrise, the oldest appeared - bright and promising.

They wanted to give me presents. I told them we had to wait for their mother.

She got me a couple of books. One was a guide to accompany the Hohner harmonica she gave me. By early afternoon, I’d mastered Mary Had A Little Lamb. Neil Young, take notice.

Later, I drove to a pipe shop. A man sold me a couple of ounces of aromatic pipe tobacco. I lied and told him that’s what my wife prefers when actually it's what both of us do.

In a second-hand rocking chair, I smoked a black cavendish blend. My tongue tasting perhaps the only flavor of the good life I'll ever know. Smoke rolls up into a blue sky, and I wonder if it will become part of a cloud.

The girls find me outside.

“Do you have to go to work today, Dad?” they ask.

“I’ve already been to work today,” I say.

“It’s church day AND Father’s Day,” the youngest says back. She smiles before adding, “They are mixed together.”

“What do you want to do today?” the oldest says. She's holding a massive piece of bamboo that she dragged home from a park. I know without a doubt that she or her sister will drop it on their bare feet soon.

“I dunno,” I say. “What do you want to do?”

She looks at me, puzzled. “But it’s Father’s Day,” she says. “You gotta choose.”

She bounces away with energy that makes my knees jealous.

I don’t know how to answer her in a way she’ll understand.

How do you tell someone that whatever makes them happy is what makes you happy?

I watch them play on the slope of the driveway. They laugh. They fight. They dance. Their feet are dirty. Their dresses cling to them thanks to the June heat. Their hair breaks free from the ties and braids their mother put in earlier. Their faces are a mixture of hers and mine. Other parts of them belong to ancestors I've never known.

I watch them, and they watch me.

It’s a small moment, but the small ones are truly the only ones that matter.

Soon, I’ll listen to a song a friend sent me. I’ve listened to it a few times today. The artist is Tommy Prine, son of the late John Prine. “Ships in the Harbor.”

The last verse wets my eyes,

'I'd do anything just to talk to my father
But I guess he was leaving soon, as we do
Yeah, I guess he was passing through, and I am too.'

That is a feeling I have today, and if I could do anything on Father’s Day, it would be to talk to him again.

Maybe that's the strange gift—you spend part of today missing someone who raised you while also trying to become the kind of person your own children will remember when you're gone.

All of it is enough to give a man pause.