What are fathers for? Anybody's guess
The Column: 05.13.22
I took my love to dinner last Sunday and told her what an excellent mother she is and it’s absolutely true, I observed her in action all those years, driving our child to appointments, reading to her, rocking her to sleep, listening to her anxieties, attending numerous meetings with teachers, but then the question of my fatherhood arises and I am pleading the Fifth, so no questions, please, I’m well aware of my inadequacies.
I’m not proud, but after my first cup of coffee, when I sit down at the laptop, my self-esteem problems go away. This is the beauty of writing, it takes the mind off one’s failures, failure is simply valuable material for comedy, and thanks to my long-standing habit of never reading my own books, I am perpetually hopeful. When I sit down to write, I am 27 again. Everything is possible.
I made a living in radio and writing fiction, neither of which demand strong character. And now I’m embarked on a new career as an octogenarian stand-up and when I say to the audience: “There was an old man of Bay Ridge who cried out, ‘Sonuvabitch! I got up in the night and on came the light and I find I have peed in the fridge’” and the audience laughs aloud, even the Lutherans, I’m completely unselfconscious. I got the laugh and that’s more than enough, it doesn’t matter that I wear this face of failed fatherhood. Maybe the f.o.f.f. is an asset in comedy.
Vanity is useless for a man my age, like walking around with a bowling ball. Set it down. Get over yourself. A child who has an excellent mother is going to be okay, the father can go write novels. My dad was a good man but he had six kids and I cannot recall a single time when he sat down and had an earnest conversation with me, he was busy working two jobs and tending his garden. So I found surrogate fathers such as Uncle Don and Mr. Faust my history teacher and Bob Lindsay who taught journalism and Irv Letofsky at the paper where I worked and my editor Roger Angell, and that is a great wealth of fatherliness, one really can’t ask for more.
A few town mothers in my hometown were responsible for the cultural life, whatever there was, and then the town fathers destroyed all the magnificent 19th-century buildings, the Carnegie library, the county courthouse, several fine churches, some downtown business blocks, and replaced them with generic boxes. Our great-grandfathers had sought to ennoble the commoners and our fathers trashed the place, and now it’s a hollow shell in the suburban sprawl. You could drive through it and never notice it’s there. So I never go back.
Some things you need to do for yourself, no father can help. I quit a three-pack-daily smoking addiction one day and it disappeared in about a week. I discarded alcohol on my own. I was afraid of being a hopeless alkie, someone who can’t quit booze, so I quit rather than be hopeless. I didn’t want to go to AA and hear sad stories and have to tell my own, so I skipped ahead to sobriety.
When COVID appeared, my love and I went into semi-isolation and the clock became irrelevant, and after decades of hecticity, COVID gave us the simple peasant life of couplehood in our thatched hut of a New York apartment. I was a failed father but I aim to be a good husband. The woman deserves no less. I even wrote her a poem.
M is for her double gin martini.
O is for the onyx diamond pin.
T is for the tiny black bikini.
H is for her handbag, leopardskin.
E is for the emeralds on her finger.
R is for her brand-new red Ferrari.
I’m her lover, writer, passenger, and singer,
And for my failures I am truly sorry.
Father’s Day is sometime in June, I forget when, because we’ve never observed it. Compared to pregnancy and childbirth, the donation of sperm is incidental. She heard the cry from the crib and went up and rocked the child to sleep and I heard the siren call of notoriety and hit the road and wrote on planes and in hotel rooms and walked onstage and did monologues and loved the whole long trek and was it worth it? The jury is still deliberating. But when the woman walks into the room and puts her hands on the man’s shoulders, it’s a beautiful day already.
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I have better memories of my father than you (or many of the other commenters). It would take a book to describe him (one I should write) but briefly he was not very demonstrative (or family was no huggers) but I remember sitting on his lap and him reading to me or playing catch in the meadow near our house in NE Minneapolis. He only had an 8th grade education in a one room school but was very well read on a number of subjects. Said I'd have to go to the U (of MN) since it was just 3 miles away and it was the only school he could afford. Weel, all he had to provide was room and board for 3 years until I got married since I had scholarships all the way through. We probably got closer when we batched it since my mother died halfway through my sophomore year. We had some heated discussions but one time, over doing the dishes, I said, Dad, do you realize we're arguing toward the middle, and he agreed. He survived two 29 year marriages (both my mother and my stepmother were great) and died peacefully in his easy chair, reading the Bible. He and my mother helped make me the person I am.
My Dad was like you! He told the best stories and had a great sense of humor! He also ran a tight ship with the rules of the house! One rule was that there was no use of the phone during dinner. Dinner began at 6:00pm, and he would say grace. One night just as he rose to say grace, the phone rang. He grabbed the phone and said "O, Lord, for what we are about to receive...". He realized he was speaking into the phone! Like you ,he loved and respected our Mother and we were always to rise when she walked into the room.and to thank her for the meat loaf and Jello salad. Amen