Father’s Day: Sunday musings…6/16/2024
Each year I post the story of my last true visit with my Dad. His dementia robbed us of him long before he passed. I stumbled across another post about how children so often quietly bond with their Dads over a shared passion, and I thought I would add it to my Father’s Day thoughts. With the loss of my Mom still so fresh today brings equal parts of renewed pain and longing, now for both parents, and joy in the fact that I had them both for as long as we all did.
I will try my best to dwell there, in that joy.
A Brief Father’s Day Visit From My Dad
My siblings and I only need to remember one weekend each year when it comes to celebrating my Dad. His birthday almost always falls within a day or two of Father’s Day. So it was that I found myself in Rhode Island the past couple of days, in the company of my Mom and a guy masquerading as my Dad, a guy who was very curious about the new fella who’d dropped by for a visit.
Getting old is not for sissies, my friends.
Somewhere inside, deep inside, there’s still some of my Dad in the jumbled up connections of his mind, carried by the body that failed him in such spectacular fashion 2 ½ years ago. Dad is extremely intelligent, the only family member in his generation to have gone to college. Quite the athlete, he used football and the GI Bill to pay for school. Like so many in his generation he then worked, raised a family, and put himself through grad school. He won his club championship in golf twice at the ages of 50 and 60. No typo. Beat the reigning RI State Amateur champ on his home course for the first one.
As we sat on the porch of his house overlooking the par 5 14th hole, I had an ever so brief visit from that guy. From my Dad. Like a citizen of Brigadoon he came slowly through the mist of his mind to join me for a bit. We’d always bonded over golf. My brother and I never turned down an invitation to join him on the course, either as partners or as caddies for him and his buddies. It was quite a privilege to do either; my Dad’s most elemental essence was expressed on the golf course.
A light breeze was blowing through the forest in the back yard just beyond the rough. We chuckled at the golfers who failed to take the wind into consideration, sheepishly trying to sneak into our yard to retrieve their out-of-bounds second shot. Dad talked about caddying as a kid in the Depression. We both noted the absence of caddies as the foursomes passed in and out of view. It was really very nice.
I quite like the Dad of my adulthood. Quick to smile, slow to anger, unfailingly loyal and kind. It’s hard to imagine now how distant he was when I was a boy, his friendship as an adult is so easy. I’m not sure how long we sat there to be honest, nor when I noticed that he was slipping away. As surely as the village of Brigadoon disappears, the mist had returned to claim him. I got up, walked over to his chair, held his hand and gave him a kiss. I wished him a Happy Birthday and a Happy Father’s Day, hoping that I’d made it on time. That he was still there. That he knew it was me, Darrell, his oldest child. I told him I loved him.
He smiled and gave my hand a little pat as he disappeared into the mist.
I really miss my Dad.
Tethered to the Memories
Most of us have (or had) a Dad who played a role in our lives. Mostly good, often hard, unfortunately not so good in some cases, but undoubtedly memorable in all cases. We have memories. At some point memories are all we have.
Most families have a “thing”, a certain activity or place or topic around which memories orbit. Maybe it’s a vacation spot to which your family returns as inexorably as the swallows of Capistrano or the Monarch Butterflies of Brazil. For some it’s not the location so much as what transpires there. Think family dinner here where the memories are of nightly discourse covering anything from poetry to pugilism, a travel of the mind more than the body.
When it comes to Fathers it’s often a case of the child inheriting the father’s chosen sport. As I think of this a hundred images appear of tiny children tagging along as their Dad does whatever it is he does. Invisibly tethered to their father by sharing his time with his passion, all the while being infected with that passion themselves. I see little girls in oversized Wellies holding their Daddy’s hand, his other cradling a shotgun, as they trudge through a marsh. A Dad’s bare feet submerged just off the dock as a tiny son’s size 2’s dangle feet above that same pond while bobbers float just out of view.
For us it was golf, for my brother and me at least. Father’s Day meant getting up an hour or so before Dad, cramming in random calories, and then walking to the caddy shack for another Sunday loop. Except on this Sunday the caddy master tossed us a bone and put us in my Dad’s group. We were pretty good caddies, my brother and I, and my Dad was a more than pretty good golfer. He made sure to make his game with other of the better golfers on Father’s Day. Good caddies always make for better golf, and 4 good golfers squired by 2 good caddies makes for a very good round, indeed. Those are some good memories.
We grew to be good friends on the golf course, my Dad, my brother, and I. On one magical morning Randall and I became men, at least in the golf sense. One Saturday morning (sadly not a Father’s Day) we headed to the first tee with Dad not as caddies but as real golfers. Partners in his foursome, with caddies of our own. In time we were joined by a brother-in-law as we towed our Dad along on a decades long golf odyssey. We’d found our connection, and like the little girl in her Wellies and the little boy with dangling toes we kept ourselves tethered to our Dad through his passion.
And we made memories.
That’s all that’s left now, the memories. We’ll not try to remember what we had in the end. These newer memories don’t sing as sweetly and so we tried to erase them as soon as they arose. Rather, we will try to share those other, older memories with Dad before the tether frayed. Until that one day when we held our end of the tie and it lay quietly against our side, empty, nobody there to whom we were still tethered.
If we are fortunate we reach out our own hand and find it filled with tiny fingers, and we walk to wherever, tethered to tiny little legs that struggle to keep up as they chase our passion with us. We feel the stillness, the emptiness on the other side where we were once tethered ourselves. If we are very fortunate we realize that maybe we still are. Tethered, that is.
Tethered by the memories of when we were the child whose tiny fingers nestled into our Father’s hand and we chased what became our shared passion, together.
Happy Father’s Day.
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 16th, 2024 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.