Father's Day

It was a good father's day, this year. We made a special breakfast and Daddy seemed content to watch the boys play in the wading pool, splashing and squealing in the sun. Sage saved him a flower and gave him a chart covered with stars he had earned in school, I made him some iced coffee. Life was good.

Sometimes I think about my father. He was a great guy; funny and charming. My sister and I adored him for what he was and hated him for what he was not: a father. He didn't know how to be one. He told good stories, he was larger than life, for sure, but he was incapable of putting us first.

I eventually forgave him, and anger turned to pity. He died in 1991, and I grieved for him, his life half lived. He lives inside me, that part of me that wants to tell jokes and pretend like nothing bothers me. The part of me that wants to charm those who love me into always staying an arm's length away.

I used to ask him about his father, who died when my father was a young man, about the age I was when my father died. My father could never bring himself to speak of him, the pain too raw thirty years later. I learned from my cousins that he was a kind, quiet gentle man who loved books more than farming. When the family's Tennessee Valley cotton farm began to go under he hung himself from a pipe in the basement. As a young girl I would go down there and stare at the pipe, and wonder how he could do it, leave us behind with such a brutal legacy.

I watch my husband with our boys, playing with them, being with them in a way my father never could with me. I realize I come from a long line of broken men, raising broken children. I will be damned if I will let my sons be raised with giant holes the wind can blow through, empty shells that can make you laugh but are filled with chaff and dust.

I wonder if my grandfather can see me. I wonder if he would have liked me. I wonder what my father would have thought of my sons had he not drunk himself to death. I hold my son and smell his hair and wonder if either one ever had a moment like this, two boys laughing in the sun, the other held tight with wordless contentment and joy. I hope they had that much, one perfect moment of love. I really do.