June 17, 2012

No stealth rain this morning, just blatant sunshine, so clear and bright it's one of the blessings of the day, Father's Day, and Sunday.  It seems to me the a lot of times father's miss out, they do not get to spend as much time with the children as mother's do.  As both my father and my husband were sailor's and away from home for great stretches of time, this was particularly true of them.  There were all kinds of ways to include them, letters being the most common, but even letters and in our case, tapes of the children, did not replace the day-to-day intimacy of being there.  Yet, their work made all that day-to-day living possible, the safety of it, the permanence of it.  Even in hard times, it did not occur to either man in my life to leave, to go and live by themselves and not be responsible for anyone else, not have anyone depend on them, not have to give up anything that they made.  They both shared and worked and seems to me rarely got the kind of thanks they were due.  Perhaps the very work that made so much possible, kept them away in more ways than were fair.

I cannot answer for my kids, but they have told me that lessons they learned from their father involved integrity, and hard work, and being responsible, and doing the right thing even when you would rather not.  All those years of getting up and going to work every morning, and never complaining, it's astonishing.  For my husband, years and years of work without ever even so much as being late, and a handful of sick days in all those years, when there could have been so many more.  For my dad, all those extra jobs which had so many reasons but some of those reasons were lessons for us in all kinds of things, art, and music, and dance.  One of the reasons I think that for us any kind of creativity is worth making room for, worth giving time, worth giving a trial.

There do not seem to be poems about fathers the way there are about mothers, and a lot of the poems for fathers seem to involve struggle, and competition, and anger, even sadness, in a way the poems for mothers do not.  Again, perhaps it is that distance that is part of the life of being a father, or perhaps we all need someone to struggle against to learn who we are, or need someone to measure up to, or someone to make the ground of our life a place of safety, of trust.

The poem for today is quiet, and demonstrates a father's love . . .

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When  the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

For today, and every day, for all the fathers providing love's austere and often lonely offices, happy Father's Day.  Though we may not always remember to thank you for that daily work, we appreciate it, and know it's part of your love, part of being the dad, part of our lives that like the air we breathe is essential and rarely gets noticed.

Happy Father's Day to all the fathers, may your special day be just that . . . special in every way!