AN IMPERFECT FATHER!

In today’s newspapers we see article after article about fathers, fat ones and thin ones, tall and short ones, business fathers and professional fathers: all kinds of fathers. After all, it is Fathers’ Day.

One thing I noted, though, was that each was perfect, or near perfect. I suspect that during this coming week, in a courtroom somewhere, a man will stand convicted of a heinous crime, and a neighbor will testify as a character witness, and will say: “but he is a good father”.
My father was far from perfect, by today’s standards.
I was attempting to write a Fathers’ Day column.
I began with these three paragraphs, and went on to list why I did not consider my own father to be like the fathers that others looked up to, the fathers that loved them, that hugged them, that stayed at home with them.

I told about his seeming lack of emotion when I had difficult times as a child, as a teenager and as a young adult. I explained that he never took the time out of his busy life to take me fishing or hunting.

I complained about lying in my bed, beset with polio and pain and paralysis, with my mother beside me, but with my father only occasionally standing in the door, stoic and solemn. I described the ceremony when my mother pinned my Eagle Scout badge on me in the Chattahoochee Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and he sat quietly in the audience.

My working days began early in my life, toiling at my father’s Ford dealership, first cleaning floors and tools in the service department, later inventorying parts in the parts department while my friends attended Christmas parties during the holidays. I described how he had driven me to the airport in Tallahassee to go to my first duty station in the Pacific during the Korean War, and how he shook my hand and told me to “be careful”, the exact words he used the first time he let me drive our family car by myself.

Then I tried to ameliorate this description, and to justify his failings, by telling of his early childhood and his growing up without a father; his service to his country when he went to France during the Great War; his hard work in beginning his dealership in Chattahoochee and how it survived through the Depression and World War II.

I remembered when I was at home on my “boot” leave and he asked me if I felt if I were capable of being an officer. When I assured him that I was, he said: “Do it. You owe it to your country”. He did not suggest that an officer’s life might well be easier for me. And when I finished my six years of active duty, and returned home, he welcomed me, not with a hug or with tears, but by handing me the keys to the front door of the dealership and telling me to open the next morning, and that I would be back in the parts department at the same wage that I was paid nine years before.

As I wrote out these scathing remarks, taking out some deep seated frustrations, I recalled a letter that I had received from him in his later years. He must have been seventy five years old. He had typed out, on his old manual typewriter, a letter to me that was titled “On Being Proud”. I found it and re-read it. He listed some things that I had forgotten: my eagerness to learn to read and to find out things from books; my work in the Boy Scouts as a leader; my college career.

He told me how pleased he was that I had not accepted a direct commission in the Air Force but had decided to enlist in the U. S. Navy and later to become an officer. He praised my work with our church. He described how happy he was when Theresa and I adopted our three children. He ended up with praise for my service to my community.

And as I read the letter, I realized that I was, indeed, writing about “An Imperfect Father”.

I was writing about myself.