The annual paean to parenthood

I love Father’s Day. It allows me to indulge in holding forth on two of my favorite topics, my father and my son.

The photo above, circa 1980, pictures my dad as I remember him. Clockwise from my sister Connie, lower left, are the late twins Penrod and Xenon, my brother Terry, my mom and I’m the happy-looking camper in red at the bottom right. Not pictured is my sister Peggy, who was competing in an underwater pickle-stacking competition that day.

That was my Dad in the middle. Round and jolly.

I don’t know where he’s at in this solo photo. I suspect it was during he and my mom’s trip to Israel about the same time the inheritance ran out. But it’s a lovely photo of my Dad because it’s a little unclear, and the composition and background emphasize the remoteness of the subject. He’d give you the shirt off his back, but wouldn’t want to talk about it the next time he saw you. He’d have a story or a joke for you instead.

A lot of people read that as a “KICK ME” sign on my Dad’s back and gave him the business every chance they got. And every time someone kicked his ass by being more duplicitous than he was, my Dad and Mom picked up and started something else, somewhere else. At different times we owned restaurants, cleaners, grocery stores, even an industrial lacquer thinner dealership where he and my Mom or he and I would personally roll 55-gallon drums of toxic poison into the back of our International Harvester, up to four at a time, and drop them off around town to D-grade Earl Schieb-wannabes. He was in his 60s then, back when being in your sixties was old.

He taught me a lot about hard work and not complaining. The hard work part rubbed off, I’m sorry to say the not-complaining part never really took hold as much, as faithful readers already know.

If I could change one thing in my life, it might be to go back to the summer he subcontracted me to help him with his intra-city shlepping gig for a regional drug store chain, and pick his brain about his life and his stories as we drove around town all day, instead of trying to engage him in well-meaning discussions of RUSH lyrics, or sitting in stoned silence, three feet and a million miles away from him.

Cruel bastard that I am, I am making sure my son will not have the luxury of that particular regret. (He’ll have a different one, or a whole set of complaints…)

I have the luxury of making him a huge priority in my life in a way that my Dad, with his four kids and star-crossed business career never had. I work from home and I can’t really sleep due to a bad back, so I’m always here and I’m almost always awake (and working).

So every chance I get, I sit him down and blow his mind. And when he has a better point than I do – and it’s happened – I’ve ceded the issue to him (usually involving the procurement of some specific form and amount of candy) and hopefully taught him that the better-framed argument rightfully wins the battle. So always look for and promote that stronger argument.

(Here’s an example from just this morning of that principle in practice:)



I’ve thought my whole life (on and off, not like, obsessively or anything) about the right way to raise a child, as opposed to the way I saw a lot of my peers raised. And when the moment to test my theories came along, it turned out I was right the whole time:

You can talk to kids like people, not things, even as young as three years old. Show them respect, not just demand it of them. Model the behaviors you’d like to see from them, even some calculated to be a little bad. You can teach a kid to distinguish between right and wrong and to make the right choice without turning him into a wussie. Sometimes a wrong choice comes along with so little downside, you might just as well say “fuck it” and go for it.

That’s an important lesson and I’m pretty sure The Missus doesn’t have teaching it on her to-do list.

And of course, he continues to teach me, too. Besides just occasionally out-arguing me, he makes me feel stuff inside I didn’t used to think I had the receiving equipment for. When I am parenting my son, I come the closest, albeit briefly, to being the kind of man I’ve always wanted to be. The kind of man my Dad was. No high compares to it and I speak with some authority on the subject.

The questions that guide my actions these days are, “What would my Dad do?” and “Would my son be proud of this decision?” Corny, isn’t it? But it’s true.

I’m the product of both my father and my son. I’m the connective tissue that links these two relatives who will never meet in this life, but both of whom continue to be so important in calibrating my moral center.

I always like to close a sermon with a song appropriate to the occasion, and it is in that spirit that I present the following clip of Guy Clark performing his composition, “Randall Knife.” It is a three-tissue man-weeper (I know there’s a clever name for the genre but can’t seem to recall what it is), don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Thank you for stopping by and I hope that you enjoy a Happy Fathers Day in whatever capacity it applies to you.