![](\"https:\/\/www.photos-public-domain.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/pancakes-with-butter-and-maple-syrup.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
And the rolling year has once again brought us back to that most equivocal of fake holidays, \u201cFather\u2019s Day.\u201d\u00a0 When I say fake, I mean that it\u2019s a manufactured occasion that has no long history of celebration.\u00a0 Its equivocal nature is owed to the mixed feelings that everyone in a family feels about dear old Dad.\u00a0 Well, at least that\u2019s my own point of view.<\/p>\n
And this is based on my own father and the way he raised his six sons.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
A more beleaguered man has never walked the face of the Earth.\u00a0 He was always outnumbered, outgunned, behind the times, short of resources and out of patience.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember him getting through a single day in that house without screaming and hollering at several or all of us.\u00a0 We were terrible kids.<\/p>\n
We broke everything he owned.\u00a0 We lost every tool he possessed and we caused at least one disaster a week.\u00a0 His house was perpetually on the edge of crumbling into something resembling the debris piles seen in old footage of London after the Blitz.\u00a0 When leaks would develop in the house\u2019s flat roof his solution was to use a hand drill on the ceiling to direct the leak and put a bucket under it.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
He had a steam heat system which perpetually leaked at all of the radiators.\u00a0 And he battled this problem by attempting to use string and grease to seal the threads of the pipe joints.\u00a0 But the threads were so stripped that this never accomplished much of anything.\u00a0 But he soldiered on with the hope that one day he\u2019d catch up with his expenses and have a plumber come in and replace it all.\u00a0 Finally, the ceiling in the living room underneath the leakiest radiator on the second floor collapsed.\u00a0 All the plaster crashed down on the living room floor and exposed the wooden laths in the ceiling.\u00a0 One of my younger brothers was overjoyed and he said aloud, \u201cThis will finally force him to fix the ceiling once and for all.\u201d\u00a0 Well, no.\u00a0 That ceiling remained in that condition until after my father\u2019s death a number of years later.<\/p>\n
So, my example of fatherhood was definitely idiosyncratic.\u00a0 And as for Father\u2019s 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.\u00a0 But that was an impossibility.\u00a0 We were an omnipresent reminder of his status as Dad.<\/p>\n
So, on Father\u2019s Day he often fell back on his only real domestic skill.\u00a0 He could make pancakes and French toast by the imperial ton.\u00a0 And in that house, he had to.\u00a0 He bought the cheapest pancake mix and syrup he could find in bulk containers.\u00a0 I always imagined that he got it from war surplus.\u00a0 And when pancake day arrived, he\u2019d cover all the burners on the stove with griddles and he would cook and we would eat stacks of pancakes until we couldn\u2019t move.\u00a0 It was probably the high point of our lives together.\u00a0 For that brief time, we were all happy simultaneously and we were all well fed which rarely otherwise occurred.<\/p>\n
So maybe Father\u2019s Day should be like that.\u00a0 A day when Dad should find something he knows he can do that makes the whole family admit that he\u2019s good for something other than paying the bills.\u00a0 Anyway, it\u2019s a thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And the rolling year has once again brought us back to that most equivocal of fake holidays, \u201cFather\u2019s Day.\u201d\u00a0 When I say fake, I mean<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,288,3366,818,1263,2860],"tags":[83,1936,2093],"class_list":["post-29239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-humor","category-life-in-dunwich","category-ocf","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-reclaiming-the-family","tag-family","tag-fathers-day","tag-reclaiming-the-family"],"yoast_head":"\n