Father’s Day
Originally published in Oregon Quarterly
Hallmark cards were not made for this guy.
Father’s Day was a big deal in my house not just because it was Father’s Day, and my father was one to whom homage was paid, the coins of the realm being argyle socks and cans of Wilson tennis balls, but because it ushered in the annual allowance-draining third week in June. This was the week that included Father’s Day, my father’s birthday and my parents’ anniversary. One, two, three, right in a row. Every week during the six months between Christmas and the third week in June I put away a part of my allowance (which topped out at $2.50 when I was a senior in high school) to buy gifts for these three occasions.
I am remembering this thirty, oh-my-God forty years later, because today June 18, 2006 is my first fatherless Father’s Day. My father died last year, August 1, in his bed, in his apartment, after breakfast. One of the home health ladies was with him, the big, pillowy, Sweet-Jesus-I’m-born-again woman whose name I don’t recall. My father was a casual, northern-bred racist whose only expressed thoughts about Blacks (and Puerto Ricans) were that they brought down property values. I’m not sure, exactly, what he thought about being cared for by Black women – all his home caregivers were Black women – but I imagine he considered them domestic servants, which in a way they were, and dealt with it like that. When I was growing up, we had had a Black woman come in to clean our house every Thursday, driven in from Amityville, where the Black people lived, in a car with four other Black women who were delivered to other homes in our neighborhood.