Just the thought I keep for this month...

It will be Father's day soon enough and he is not here. Makes me wonder how many went by in our lives that I never called, sent or thought of him and how much he meant to me and our family. In an age where having no father is becoming a norm I consider myself wonderfully lucky I had a father. He beat me with his belt every time he thought I needed it, until finally he thought he could reason with me when I was older. He locked me out of the house when I refused to come home at a decent hour. He told me straight up when I looked like a punk and he was ashamed of me. He told me that I was not working hard enough for what he paid me, when I was making what he thought were bad decisions and when he expected me to be better than I was.
He laughed, and teased and tickled us. He worked hard to bring home money for all we wanted and we always wanted more. He worked hard at home to make it better and better; to fix all that broke and build what we could not buy. He sang softly in church, sure he should not mess up the hymn, he said the same grace at the table that his father had always used and he never talked about how we should believe in God or worship - he just did it. He would talk about science, mathematics and technology at the dinner table. He would take us for a Sunday drive, just to get lost together and see something new. He drove or flew us across the Midwest, visiting friends on farms and cities and tons of family everywhere.
I do not remember him reading fiction a lot, but he pointed out Jonathan Livingston Seagull to me, which I read and called a fifteen minute book, but it told me something about him and what he felt about flying. I would get special notes and letters from him as I wandered the world making my own mistakes. I loved watching the joy in his face when he found that things were better than he thought, that I and my family were doing fine, living well. He never stopped me from being a fool, and always supported my stupid attempts at becoming a man, sending me money if I needed it or being ready to come bail me out, although I was lucky I never had to have him come pick me up in jail. He did come with Mom to the hospital after my motorcycle wreck, and went out from there and rebuilt the cycle - cause he knew I was going to need to get back on it.
I still see my father, in the mirror as I realize I am getting older, in my son as he does something that makes me proud - something his grandfather would have done. Once I showed my son a black and white photo of a man at picnic table and asked him who he thought it was, he guessed it was me or my father - but I told him it was my grandfather and that I expect someday he would sit at a picnic table that very way and someone would take a picture that would match. My son and I carried the master bed downstairs to the first floor when my father was coming home after his strokes, and I assisted him when he got out of the car - a frail old sick man, too fragile to be my father, too light to be the rock of my family and life. I wonder how much it hurt him when his father suffered a stroke and spent long years, just getting by. But then I realize my father was and is always going to be a bigger and better man than I am, that is the way the world works - for I know all my failures and hardly ever saw his. His revealing to me that he thought he procrastinated too much was a shock, I never knew that he had ever put off something that needed done.
Yes, I am lucky that I had my father, or correctly, that my father had me and tried to make me a man. I can tell you if he succeeded as soon as I figure out if my son made it.