Those Little Fatherly Things You Never Forget

My father was a morning person, and I have memories of the time my brother and I spent with him every day before school. He would sit us each on a knee, as he sipped his coffee in his easy chair; we spent this down time before jumping into the routine of the day. I still recall the details of the experience: His breath smelled like black coffee, and there was a red blinking light atop a distant radio tower that always seemed to grab my sleepy attention.

I thoroughly enjoyed those moments of closeness with my father. The fact that I had to share him with my brother was a given, and I was okay with that for the most part. There were other, more unique rituals than the morning easy chair time. For example, there were the eggshell faces. Sometimes when my father served us eggs for breakfast, he would take the shells aside and draw cartoonish faces on them with a pencil. I do this from time to time for Diego and Jackson, partly, I think, to experiment on them. Will the eggshell faces become a life-long memory the way it has for me?

Another one I remember is the invisible elephant named Harold who lived behind my father’s easy chair. He was the culprit whenever we heard (or smelled) an unclaimed “bottom burp.” “Oh, that was Harold,” my father would say, quite deadpan. I tried having Harold around our house for a while, but the kids are too darn savvy for such things. Then again, I do need to remind myself; it’s unlikely my brother and I believed in Harold at the time, either. It was just fun to have a dad who blamed his farts on imaginary animals.

Occasionally when we sat in that drowsy, before-school time with him on the easy chair, he would take our hands and place them on each cheek. Mike and I would begin to giggle immediately.

“This way’s nice and smooth,” he would say in a singsong voice, guiding our hands gently, with the grain of his stubble, down his face. Sometimes Mike and I sang along. Then abruptly, he turned the hand over and pulled the back of it up his face, against the stubbly grain. This one I remember loving, because of the mixture of fun and physical pain it brought together. The anticipation of that sandpaper skin on my soft child’s hand was almost unbearable, yet I always asked him to do it again and again.

I’ve thoroughly stolen this game, and it is one of the favorites of both my boys – Jackson, especially. He can’t get enough of that one.

There are countless others I’m not thinking of right now, I’m sure. My father was a good man, and an excellent dad. He wasn’t perfect, of course; you realize that as a son more and more as time goes on. My boys will realize the same about me. But he made my childhood a place full of love and safety, and this way he did reach a kind of perfection. After all, isn’t that what every parent would like to do for their children? I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: The greatest gift my father gave me was the capacity to love, and I plan to pass it on along to my boys, in the hopes they’ll do the same someday.