Happy Father’s Day
MichaelW on Jun 17 2007 at 6:50 am | Filed under: MichaelW's Page, Uncategorized
To all of you fathers out there raising your kids, here’s wishing you a happy Father’s Day. Now that I too am a father, I have a much greater appreciation for the devotion it takes. So, in partial payment of the incredible debt due to the man who helped raise me, the only hero I’ve ever had, I want to describe how proud I am of my own dad. First, some background.
My dad is one of those people that makes an impression upon you the moment he enters the room. He exudes confidence and capability, but not in that forced, I’m-so-much-better-than-you facade that too many of us exhibit when trying to make an impression. He’s the real deal. Full of substance, and he knows how to use it. People want to get to know my dad, and when they do, they either love him or hate him, but even the most foolish comprehend that he is a person to respect. That’s the man that I grew up with, although he was not much more than a boy when I entered the world.
It’s not true to say that my dad came from nothing, but he was very young when circumstances made it clear that he would have to rely upon himself, and only himself. Growing up in Northport, Long Island in the 50’s, he had the run of the town, playing sandlot baseball and generally terrorizing his neighborhood just like any other red-blooded American boy of the time. His mother died when he was about 13, and his father (a drunk) soon found parenting to be beyond his abilities. Afterwards, my dad and his older brother (a proverbial “Irish twin“) went to live with an uncle in New Jersey, while his younger sister and brother went to an aunt’s house. Needless to say, the tumultuous times of his teenage years yielded mediocre grades in school (although, to hear him tell it, his social calendar was quite full). Even so, he never lost sight of his goal — to become an attorney.
Being a November baby, my dad graduated high school at age seventeen. It was June 1965, the Beatles had crossed the Pond, along with his favorite band The Rolling Stones, and Vietnam was beginning to rage. Despite being underage, he got his absentee father to sign permission for my father to enlist in the Navy. He was stationed in Southern California at Port Hueneme where, as luck would have it, he was barracked with my mother’s older brother. To make a long story short, despite my mother being engaged to another man (a friend of my uncle’s), my dad’s charms were too much for her. They married shortly after their first meeting, and I was born not much later. Suddenly, he was a husband, a father, and a long way off from his goal.
Never daunted, my dad enrolled in college at the University of Delaware in 1970, wife and beautiul baby boy in tow. We lived an interesting life at that time; no money, few thrills, buts lots of fun from what I remember. My dad graduated from college in three years with a 4.0 GPA, wrote a book that summer, and then began law school at the University of Pennsylvania. Because he has always been more interested in the people around him than the trappings of status, he took a chance on a small law firm in Wilmington, DE to begin his practice. That firm is now one of (if not The) most prestigious firms in Wilmington. I suppose because he needed another challenge, the year he graduated from law school, about to embark the career he had always envisioned, my parents were blessed with a second child, my sister.
So, in the span of eight years, my father became a husband, a father, a veteran, a college graduate, an author, a father again, a law school graduate, and finally a lawyer. The man was busy. But he never stopped being my dad. Despite the mind-boggling pace of change in his own journey through life, my father made sure that I would have my own experiences and discoveries. Regardless of how topsy-turvy the daily grind was in those years, I was afforded tremendous opportunities to grow and learn.
What’s funny to me now is that I don’t remember any of those trials and tribulations. I was shielded from just how tight things were back then by constant loving attention from my parents. What I recall are the little things like going to the circus, and playing hockey with my dad on my sixth birthday while the street lights hummed in an empty parking lot. I remember giggling with delight as he roll-started our ‘69 (piece-o-crap) Camaro on the hill outside our apartment, gleefully ignorant of the problems with the starter. And learning to ride a bike in a field near there, where I managed to run into the only tree for several hundred yards. As I grew older, getting carted off to soccer games at an unthinkable hour of the morning became just another “thing I do with Dad.” Looking back on it all, I didn’t have the wherewithal to appreciate it, even as I loved the time I got to spend with him. Now, as I raise my own boys, I understand the love and devotion that got my father out of bed on those cold fall mornings.
I could go on for many more paragraphs recounting the myriad stories of growing up with such a great guy for a father, but they don’t really draw the whole picture. They are just pleasant pieces to a complex puzzle. To describe what my father means to me in a sentence, it is this: He didn’t just teach me to be a man, he taught me how to be my own man. Above all else, my dad instilled in me that I am important if I make myself so, honestly and forthrightly. There’s no shame in not being the best. Shame is in not being the best that I can possibly be. Walking that thin line between never being satisfied, and owning up to my accomplishments and abilities, is quite possibly the most valuable lesson I ever learned. I have an incredible role model in that regard. It is my dad.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad. If I become even half the father to my boys that you have been to me, I will be a very lucky man indeed. I love you very much, and I am prouder of you than you probably know.
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