In Praise of Good Men

Happy Father's Day to all the men I know who are loving, gentle fathers to their children. And happy Father's Day, too, to all the men who may or may not be fathers themselves, but who are teachers, coaches, and mentors to young people who do not have a dad. You guys are the best men I know.

A poem for Father's Day:

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
--Robert Hayden
collected in Good Poems by Garrison Keillor

This poem moves me, although I do not recognize my father, or the fathers I know, in this seemingly cold and angry man. I was fortunate enough to always know that my father loved me. And the fathers that I know do not chop wood for their families, or think that being a man means to be a stoic. But this poem makes me think of them anyway, for all their acts of devotion that their children do not yet fully appreciate. This week's This American Life included a beautiful illustration of this fatherly devotion. A little boy loses his teddy bear on vacation to Disneyland, and the dad flies back to Anaheim to try and find it. The father makes a rather heroic effort to recover the bear, and the son, while not ungrateful, takes it all rather for granted. Even in what seems to be a happy and open relationship, that kid will have no idea until he grows up what it meant for his dad to go to such lengths. And for the children of parents who were too broken to be gentle, to speak kindly, it can be some comfort to examine our experiences with fresh eyes, and find the love that was no less real for having not been spoken.