Father's Day 2015

In the United States, it is Father's Day.  It is a day where fatherhood is actually held in high esteem.  People wax poetic about their father and what he did for them.  They buy presents, and make long trips for visits, even spend the day talking to them.

Father's Day is just another day to me.  I made a decision a long time ago to be a Father.  It was based on what I saw in culture.

America has waged a war on men and fatherhood.  Men have been characterized by Hollywood and general media as foolish, with one track minds.  They are driven by sex or money, if you believe the scripts, and can be fooled changing minor details.  Flip a skirt or easy money in front of them, and they will swallow the entire hook.

 My father was a little too real to be cut from that cloth.  Maybe war does that to you.  He served in a medical unit in France during World War II.  He never talked about the war, even when we would have listened.  Those demons may have haunted him the rest of his life.  I learned in the medical field that cleaning up after a battle is a unique nightmare.

My father did enough school to graduate from high school, but possessed the intelligence of a college graduate.  He could ask enough questions to confound the supposedly educated man.  I once heard him turn a highly educated engineer into a quivering mass of jelly over some building plans.  What the college graduate cooked up would have failed in reality and my dad knew it.  By the time he got done, the engineer knew it, too.

Considering how much he revered the educational accomplishments of his own children, it seemed a paradox.  His ten children combined to earn 12 post secondary degrees: three associates, three masters and six bachelors.  The next generation, his grandchildren, earned nine bachelors, two masters, and one D.O., now practicing psychiatry, with two still in high school.  Not bad for a guy who slugged it out every day as a sheet metal contractor.

Was he perfect?  Hardly.  He drank too much.  His stubbornness was the stuff of legends.  The hard head, old time diet, and pressures of life lead to an early grave.  He left us 28 years ago, at age 62.  After all, he and his bride of 41 years raised ten children, buried two within hours of birth, and there was a miscarriage in there somewhere.  They ran their own business, where he put on the same five sets of faded work clothes, and crawled around on roofs, installed duct work, and even fought with architects and engineers about designs.

He gave me his intelligence, his sense of direction, his stubbornness, and the love for a game.  I found out years after he died that he played on a State Championship basketball team.  Fort Wayne Central Catholic won the Catholic State High School Championship when championship rings went into airplanes and battleships.  Some pictures of him with bats in hand, a basketball team, a group called "The Rangers".  Maybe he dreamed of the same things I did, and it didn't make a living in those days, let alone set up generations to come.

I might have been smarter than he was, but I could not be as real as he was.  He just didn't take anything from anyone.  Knowing what I was like, especially as a teenager, I'm amazed to still be alive.