And the rolling year has once again brought us back to that most equivocal of fake holidays, “Father’s Day.” When I say fake, I mean that it’s a manufactured occasion that has no long history of celebration. Its equivocal nature is owed to the mixed feelings that everyone in a family feels about dear old Dad. Well, at least that’s my own point of view.
And this is based on my own father and the way he raised his six sons. Basically, it was like some kind of anthropological experiment that was started out with the best of intentions but then went horribly off the rails and eventually completely overwhelmed the investigators and had to be recast as a cautionary tale for all involved.
A more beleaguered man has never walked the face of the Earth. He was always outnumbered, outgunned, behind the times, short of resources and out of patience. I don’t remember him getting through a single day in that house without screaming and hollering at several or all of us. We were terrible kids.
We broke everything he owned. We lost every tool he possessed and we caused at least one disaster a week. His house was perpetually on the edge of crumbling into something resembling the debris piles seen in old footage of London after the Blitz. When leaks would develop in the house’s flat roof his solution was to use a hand drill on the ceiling to direct the leak and put a bucket under it. His idea was that by tapping the leak it would prevent it from soaking the whole plaster ceiling and have it collapse onto us while we were sleeping.
He had a steam heat system which perpetually leaked at all of the radiators. And he battled this problem by attempting to use string and grease to seal the threads of the pipe joints. But the threads were so stripped that this never accomplished much of anything. But he soldiered on with the hope that one day he’d catch up with his expenses and have a plumber come in and replace it all. Finally, the ceiling in the living room underneath the leakiest radiator on the second floor collapsed. All the plaster crashed down on the living room floor and exposed the wooden laths in the ceiling. One of my younger brothers was overjoyed and he said aloud, “This will finally force him to fix the ceiling once and for all.” Well, no. That ceiling remained in that condition until after my father’s death a number of years later.
So, my example of fatherhood was definitely idiosyncratic. And as for Father’s Day, if my father could have had his wish on that day, it would have been to lock us all out of the house for the whole day and leave him alone to watch baseball, horse racing and boxing on his tiny, pathetic, black and white, constantly drifting television set. But that was an impossibility. We were an omnipresent reminder of his status as Dad.
So, on Father’s Day he often fell back on his only real domestic skill. He could make pancakes and French toast by the imperial ton. And in that house, he had to. He bought the cheapest pancake mix and syrup he could find in bulk containers. I always imagined that he got it from war surplus. And when pancake day arrived, he’d cover all the burners on the stove with griddles and he would cook and we would eat stacks of pancakes until we couldn’t move. It was probably the high point of our lives together. For that brief time, we were all happy simultaneously and we were all well fed which rarely otherwise occurred.
So maybe Father’s Day should be like that. A day when Dad should find something he knows he can do that makes the whole family admit that he’s good for something other than paying the bills. Anyway, it’s a thought.