Just a word about Sunday, then I shut up

The Column: 06.17.22

Father’s Day is a wonderful joke, a day on which you sit with your brood and someone turns to you and says, “When is Father’s Day? Isn’t it in June?” and you, the father, say, “I have no idea whatsoever.” And that’s the end of it. Mother’s Day is the big deal when tanker ships full of French perfume dock at the bottling plants and four-star restaurants hire extra staff and Father’s Day is the Sunday when someone gives you a bottle of cologne that smells like disinfectant. The price tag is still on it, $1.89.

Women, as we know unless we’re in Texas or in the memory unit, run this world. There was never a single object that a man set down that a woman didn’t reach over and move it. Never a sentence came out of a man’s mouth that a woman didn’t correct. Women decide what we shall eat and what we shall sit on or sleep on, and a man’s opinion is of no more use than that of the family cat. This is a major factor in the popularity of gay marriage: two men decide they want to be free and sleep on cotton sheets and not polyester and have dark brown towels and wear festive colors rather than the prison uniforms women buy for us. The sex is an add-on, mainly it’s about exercising personal taste.

I know, I grew up in a women’s world, the kitchen, and it was great fun. These were Midwestern Christian women but once they got loose of their men, they were funny and loved cooking and tidying up, while the men did the hard work, which was conversing with their sons-in-law.

So don’t give me any cologne, my darlings. Honor your mother who endured excruciating misery and the cruel hands of male obstetricians while your old man watched TV and ate Chinese takeout.

I’m not the man my father John was. He built the house I grew up in, dug the basement, poured concrete, raised the walls, did the plumbing, planted a lawn and garden. I find it challenging to put up a pup tent on flat ground. He was a farm boy. I was a compulsive reader. I put in my time hoeing corn but I gravitated to a nest under the stairs where I read novels and poetry. To my father it was almost as if I were styling around in high heels and nylons. I regret the unhappiness I caused him. We never bonded until he was dying and I brought my little daughter to see him and they bonded instantly, she delighted him, and I got in on her ticket.

Things are different now. Traveling around last week, in and out of airports, it was touching to observe the gentleness of young fathers with small children, their sweetness and patience, a far cry from the brusque tyrants of old. In my boyhood, daddies weren’t cuddlers, they were the warden, chief critic, executive, and it was beautiful to see up close a young dad with a weepy infant in arms and two rambunctious toddlers, speaking kindly to his offspring as he installed them in a row, comforting, encouraging, coaxing. Back in my day, dads were enforcers of high standards to which their children aspired but inevitably failed leaving an embittered pater consoling himself with a bottle of Scotch, and now a loving style of fatherhood predominates. This bodes well for humanity.

Nonetheless, it strikes me as wasteful to set aside a Sunday in June to honor ejaculation. Put fatherhood together with motherhood for Mom & Dad Day in May and maybe start a new day in June in honor of underlings, minions, employees, offspring, in recognition of the fact that leaders learn from people below them on the organization chart. Many clerks have brought up their bosses to be decent human beings. I’ve learned a great deal from fan letters, e.g., what they omit. There is nothing so instructive as standing in front of a group of people you’re supposed to teach. You learn about comedy from listening to the laughter. Parenting skills are taught by small children.

Maybe on Underling Day you’d turn society upside down and put the inmates in charge of the asylum. I don’t know. When I divorced his mother, my son, who was seven, said, “Why can’t you and Mom take turns being right?” I still haven’t answered that question.

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