Ammo Grrrll makes a toast TO DADS AND FLAGS. She writes:
Today may be a so-called “unlucky” day, but fear not, for we have two rather important days in a row to look forward to: Flag Day and Father’s Day.
I had a workmate in my old type shop whose youngest son was born on June 14. For the first several years of his life, they told him all those flags were to celebrate HIM, which I thought was charming. I guess at some point he had doubts.
Our little baby once believed he was being similarly feted. It was 1974 and we had gathered in beautiful Sterne Grove in San Francisco for a concert by the fabled Preservation Hall Jazz Band. The concert was free to attendees, but it was “festival seating” which meant you had to get there early with your blanket and picnic basket. With a baby, you also had to have a diaper bag, toys, the blankie, stuffed animals, teething biscuits, sunscreen, and so on.
As the day got warmer and the hours got longer, it became clear that bringing a one-year-old to an outdoor festival may not have been the greatest idea. Though he was a notoriously easy baby in general, he was getting tired and cranky. In a shocking development to anyone familiar with festivals, the musicians were already an hour late setting up.
Near the end of my rope, I pulled out my son’s favorite book – Scuffy the Tugboat – and asked him “What does Scuffy say?” And he replied, albeit without his customary enthusiasm, “Doot Doot!” Just at that very moment the ancient black jazz musicians appeared on stage to thunderous applause and a standing ovation.
And the look on Jacob’s face was “Thank you, thank you, yes, I AM worthy! Would you like to hear now what the cow says? I can do several other animals. I take requests.”
Would that every American veteran could experience similar thunderous applause and a standing ovation for his or her service. In our Gated Geezer Enclosure, young Boy Scouts (stupidly now, just “Scouts”) put up dozens and dozens of flags at both entrances and elsewhere. It is a festive and heart-stirring sight.
And, of course, as I said, the day after that is Father’s Day. For me, a day of love and remembrance, but also a day of more generalized celebration of all fathers. My father was a very young father – just 21 when I was born. Heck, some people believe that he still had five years to go even to be responsible for his own decisions because his brain wasn’t fully formed yet! Guess he never should have been allowed to sign up for WW2.
Unlike all the rest of us, my Dad was not perfect, not always the easiest guy to get along with. But I find myself missing him more and more with each passing year since his death. Do any of the rest of you also find that in our extremely late “middle age,” we are more forgiving of those imperfections and more certain that our parents were simply doing the best they could?
Which has had me thinking lately about whether or not even a pretty bad father is not better than none. I know this will generate some strong opinions. Let me give you two examples that have influenced my thinking. Now, obviously, “bad” is a matter of degree. And some things are very bad indeed, and not really forgivable. I get that and my Daddy was nowhere NEAR “bad.” Difficult, yes, but loving, hard-working and never abusive.
One foster son who lived with us for a year was from El Salvador. I will call him G. He had left home and made his way toward El Norte at about age 14. As his story leaked out, he told me that his father beat the kids, beat the wife and – something I honestly had never heard before – beat his own mother. Truly, a monster of a man. But he taught G. a work ethic like I’ve never seen in a teenager.
G was the kind of teenager who worked three jobs and was upset when there was a three-day weekend and he couldn’t work. He got a job assembling pallets. The job originally paid an hourly wage, but the owner had recently switched to piecework. G. could turn out a pallet in so very few minutes that – yes, of course you guessed it – the greedy son of a gun changed BACK to an hourly wage to avoid giving G his due! He never complained, just got a better job.
He worked for a fast-food chain that involved some hot cheese sauce and once a careless co-worker spilled some all over his hand and arm, burning him pretty severely. He fought desperately NOT to go to the hospital because he would miss work. But even that chain figured out that he was a Workers Comp disaster waiting to happen and forced him to go. I think he was out for one day.
G married an American woman, became an American citizen, moved to Florida, got a dream job as an OTR trucker, and had a very bright little girl who eventually graduated from a STEM-oriented high school. We could use several million more Gs as legal immigrants.
Is even a BAD father better than none? One more example.
My best friend, R, in Minnesota had a father who was also a monster. His father had been raised in a brothel where both his mother and older sister were working. As an adult, he was an OTR trucker who, it eventually turned out, had a family elsewhere as well. Oddly enough, he was very respectful to his wife, R’s mother, and helped her with dishes and such. So R learned to respect women and housework.
He also learned to protect women. His mother was quite overweight before a 100-lb. weight loss from joining Weight Watchers. Once when she was still heavy, the family went to the DQ. R and his mother were in line and his father and sister were still in the car with the windows open. Some teenage toughs made an unkind remark about whether such a fat person should be in line at the DQ and his father came out of the car, clocked the guy, and got back in the car. His buddies carried the miscreant off – no cops, no lawsuits, street justice.
Anyway, R turned out to be a track star whose records at his large Iowa High School were not broken for 25 years. A Vietnam vet, he was a hard-working husband and father. The son took what was good from his father and avoided the bad.
As I said earlier, these are all anecdotal cases, not hard data on whether or not it is worse to have no father than a less-than-perfect or even bad one. I know what the prison stats indicate. But I conclude with my final example, again from a boy we fostered who was from Honduras.
L. had probably been born to a sex worker, so a father was absolutely unknown. He was a street kid from age 5 on until an old island lady took him in for a few years before she died. He was illiterate in Spanish and, of course, English, but had an obvious raw intelligence. He was a decent athlete and extremely good dancer.
In one conversation Joe had with him, this is what was said: “I want to be a backup dancer for Janet Jackson or play in the NFL. And someday when I get famous, I will be rich and I will hire a private detective to find my father in Honduras.”
And Joe asked: “And then what?”
And L. replied very matter-of-factly: “And then I will kill him.”
Boys without fathers. A very very bad thing. Girls without fathers — no bargain either.
I thank God every day I had a pretty darn good Daddy. And handsome, too. Aside from providing a good gene pool, he raised me to be “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” tough. He raised me to be unafraid of being in the minority. He made me feel loved and protected. He never once – and we are talking YEARS before the scourge of “feminism” – ever let me think there was anything a boy could do that I could not at least TRY to do. And I pity the fool boy pretending to be a girl who had ever tried to enter a restroom or locker room with me in it.
God Bless you, all fathers. You are so much more important than you know. May you have a happy day.
