Father's Day

Image borrowed from Bing

Father's Day

Sooner or later, if you are fortunate, you get be a father, and if you stick around a while you probably will become a grandfather. These roles are self-induced, self-imposed, and not to be taken lightly. I was probably too bombastic as a stepfather, and now kind of wimpy as a grandfather, but other than the role of husband, which I adore, these roles fill you with inexplicable delight.

Over on THE WRITER'S ALMANAC, they gave us some history of this day:

Today is Father's Day. The holiday that we celebrate on the third Sunday in June traces its roots to 1910, but the first recorded celebration of a holiday honoring fathers took place in Fairmont, West Virginia, on July 5, 1908. Grace Golden Clayton wanted to celebrate the lives of 210 fathers who had died in a mining cave-in in Monongah, West Virginia. That particular observance was never promoted outside of Fairmont, and no mention was made of it until years later. The Father's Day that took root owes its origins to Sonora Smart Dodd, of Spokane, Washington. She heard a Mother's Day sermon in 1909 and thought it might be nice to honor fathers as well. So the following year, she promoted the idea with the support of area churches. The holiday was generally met with ridicule, and it didn't gain traction for a few years. The first bill to make it a national holiday was introduced in Congress in 1913, but in spite of encouragement by President Woodrow Wilson, it didn't pass. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson issued a proclamation designating the third Sunday in June to honor fathers, and it finally became an official, permanent national holiday during the Nixon administration.

Several memoirs have been written about fathers and their relationships — often troubled — with their author offspring. Poet and playwright Nick Flynn's father, Jonathan, was an ex-con who fancied himself a writer, but he was a drunk and lost his dreams and his family at the bottom of a bottle; one night, homeless and looking for a place to sleep, he turned up at the shelter where Nick was working. One entire chapter of Nick Flynn's memoirAnother Bulls**t Night in Suck City (2004) consists solely of euphemisms for drinking: "The usual I say. Blood of Christ I say. Essence. Spirit. Medicine. A hint. A taste. A bump. A snort. A sip. A nip. I say another round. I say brace yourself. Lift a few. Hoist a few. Work the elbow. Bottoms up. Belly up. Leg up. What'll it be. Name your poison. Mud in your eye. A jar. A jug. A pony. I say a glass. I say same again. I say all around. I say my good man. I say my drinking buddy. I say git that in ya." And so on.
Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff's father, Duke, was a con artist and compulsive liar, and the family was often on the run from creditors and the law; as Geoffrey wrote in his memoir, The Duke of Deception (1990): "We packed, walked away from every thing. I wish I had the stuff now, letters, photographs, a Boy Scout merit badge sash, Shep's ribbon: Gentlest in Showat the Old Lyme grade school fair. My father had had his two favorite suits rewoven; he left the rest behind with most of his shoes, umbrellas, hats, accessories … I brought my typewriter and my novel. While my father had watched television I had written a novel. I worked on it every night, with my bedroom door shut; my father treated it like a rival, which it was, a still, invented place safe from him. He made cracks about The Great Book, and resented me for locking it away every night when I finished with it, while he shut down the Late Show, and then the Late Late. I made much of not showing it to him."

Poet Honor Moore wrote about her father — a bisexual Episcopal priest — inThe Bishop's Daughter (2008): "Once, after supper, my father swept me up into his black seminarian's cape and across the street for Evensong. I remember the starry sky, the cold darkness as we climbed the stairs to the seminary and stepped along the grassy path to the chapel. I could already hear it, something like the rushing of wind, the coming of a storm. We were late, and as we slipped into the pew in the candlelit church full of men I understood that the rushing sound was singing. The rumbling voices of priests and seminarians, resounding against the stone walls of the small chapel, were otherworldly, even Godlike. I was scared, and so I leaned against my father, nuzzling the black cape still fresh from the night air, but he didn't look down at me or put his hand on my head. Now he belonged to something else, this big and strange sound, so deep and loud it made me shake."