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Gifts from my father on Father’s Day
“My father didn’t tell me how to live;
he lived, and let me watch him do it”― Clarence B. Kelland
I was lucky to have a father who was a college professor, a world traveler and a master conversationalist. You would be hard pressed to find subject he couldn’t speak on knowledgeably, in detail. And he talked to everyone. He was as likely to be great friends with the security guard at the mall as he was with fellow educators.
Fatherhood came late in life to him at 46. He asked for the senior citizen discount everywhere we went, always an embarrassment to my teenage self. People generally assumed he was my grandfather. That’s what it looked like. I didn’t love that, but with his age came a certain calm demeanor most fathers did not possess. He rarely got annoyed or impatient with anyone.
He wasn’t the perfect father and I wasn’t the perfect daughter. I can’t stress the second part of that statement enough. I was not easy. We struggled through our relationship at times, wondering what to make of one another. He grew up a child of immigrants in the depression-era 30’s in Manhattan. I grew up a child of the 80’s in the New Jersey suburbs. We had a large gap to bridge. He couldn’t abide Madonna’s talk of virginity, or lack thereof and I didn’t want to relax into Tchaikovsky. He was a 61 year old father to a 15…
