Father's Day came and went last weekend. It coincided with my wife and my anniversary and the summer solstice all on the same day. That must mean something. My wife chose to prioritize Father's Day because, well, twenty-nine years is a nice number, but it's not all that special, and she wanted me to be celebrated by the kids.
I went to church on Father's Day. My wife was going to join me but there was a puppy emergency, and she stayed home on the phone with poison control while I went off to church alone. On Mother's Day, the church is packed. It's a great service and a great celebration with everyone in their finest. It's one of my favorites of the year, but last Sunday, on Father's Day, the church was, well, much less than full. It's as if in anticipation of Mother's Day, the mothers let the family know they will all be going to church and to be ready. On Father's Day, fathers just kinda go, "ehhh. Let's go if it works out." I would have loved to have had my children with me, but I wanted them to want to go, not be made to go. "That's the exact wrong attitude," my wife told me. "You need to tell them what you want." Well, I want them to want to join me. Maybe that's asking too much.
I keep a picture of my father near my coffee maker and glance at it most mornings while the coffee is brewing. He's somewhere in his mid-twenties in the picture, standing in someone's kitchen holding a fish he caught and showing it off to the camera. It's a good-sized speckled trout he probably caught somewhere around Dauphin Island over sixty years ago. My dad has been a menace to the speckled trout population his whole life. He can sniff them out, read the water, knows how deep to fish the bait, and come up with fish over and over again. I've been in the boat with him when we were catching fish, doing what he told us, surrounded by boats who couldn't catch a thing. We were bringing them in, and they couldn't get a strike. It's my father’s special magic.
I showed him this picture Sunday night at my house. I invited him for a Father's Day dinner and he came and offered to bring, what else, fish. It was freshly caught snapper, and I've become a big fan of cooking everything in a cast iron skillet in the oven, and we had a heck of a meal. Dad looked at the picture and laughed. No telling how many pictures he's had taken of him holding up a fish. He didn't remember anything from the photo. It was a long time ago, after all.
Maybe that's how it works with fathers. We don't demand to be remembered. We just show up, catch the fish, cook the meal, and hope something takes hold in the people we love, and sometimes it does.
I'm Cam Marston, and I'm just trying to Keep It Real. The puppy’s fine by the way.
