All We Want For Father’s Day

I got lucky last year.

The thought had occurred to me to write of the day in 1982 when my father took my older brother and me to meet Johnny Unitas at Unitas' house in Maryland. I was going to explain that even after all these years I still didn't know how he'd even known Unitas, but it had something to do with business. "Business" didn't make it easier to figure out, because my father had a lot of jobs in his life, never quite making a career out of any one.

I wanted to make the point that I would be different. I believed all men compare themselves to their fathers, and all men want to do better. We'd all promised ourselves that we would not make the same mistakes our fathers made.

But something happened when I started writing. It was the same thing that always happens when people begin to give life to their ideas: I began to tell a different story. I wound up telling of the night my favorite sports team lost and how, in the midst of my childhood tears, my father put his arm around me and taught me his greatest lesson. He encouraged me, no matter what happens, to hold my head high. Always. And as it happened that Father's Day was approaching, I wrote the following:

In the years since I have been commended personally and professionally many times for keeping calm in the face of apparent obstacles and for holding my head high when things don’t break the right way. I note this not to celebrate me, but to celebrate my dad. He made me this way. On a family room couch so many years ago, with his arm wrapped tightly around me, he made me who I am today.

Thank you, Dad. Happy Father’s Day.

I mailed it to my dad, and days later we talked on the phone. He told me the story of how he'd come to meet one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of the game. Less than three months later, I would weep by my father's side in an Intensive Care Unit, knowing that his life's final hours were drifting away.

I was lucky last year to have thanked him. I know that the gifts I gave him when I was much younger were typical. Cards crafted from construction paper and authored in crayon. Clay bowls and ash trays. A tie. In later years, while I was away in college or in Charlotte building my own family and career, these offerings were replaced by simple phone calls. Phone calls that had a way of seeming like just one more thing I had to do. "Happy Father's Day." "I hope you have a great day."

I was lucky last year to have given him something different. To have told him, in the best way I knew, that he mattered.

As Father's Day approaches this year, the first one since losing my dad, I have concluded that despite what commercials and newspaper circulars push, fathers do not want more stuff. We treasure not things like grills or tools or golf clubs. We crave but one thing, and it is this: to know that we matter.

In fatherhood it is too easy to not see this. We spent our childhoods, which were not that long ago, dreaming of flying to the moon or playing professional ball. Our DNA, though, built and shaped over hundreds of years, calls us to be providers, so we toil every day in offices answering that call. This daily grind and the knowledge that we must not fail can consume us. At home, evenings with the kids quickly become blurs. We rush them to practice here or there. And while we are much more involved in the household side of life than fathers in prior generations were, there remain, despite our best efforts, so many things that the moms just seem to know how to handle better and without hesitation.

So, many days bring with them doubt. Many nights bring with them the thought that any other father could step in and take my place. He could do just as good a job getting the paycheck and driving the kids to soccer, and surely he could do no worse a job on the nightly dishes. Too often I wonder whether I have become a commodity.

Since my father's death, I've also become much more aware that time is promised to no one.

I was therefore lucky last Father's Day to have told my father how much he mattered, and I pray that he heard me.

And this Father's Day, as well as every other day when my children tell me in their own special ways how much I matter, I will pray that I'm lucky enough to hear them.