Father’s Day
So I couldn’t send the thanks-for-a-great-time cards. There was also a whole genre of he-did-everything-and-he-did it well cards, which I couldn’t send, and I-hope-I-grow-up-just-like-you cards, which, needless to say, I didn’t. Hope that I’d grow up to be just like him, that is. That left very few cards. Sappy ones were out. Religious ones were out. Ones with men on golf courses were out. And so I stood in front of many a card rack, looking at cards and putting them back, a lump in my throat. Because I didn’t have the kind of father about whom Hallmark made cards. Because I didn’t have the kind of relationship with my father about which Hallmark made cards. Because he didn’t love me. Because, maybe worse, I didn’t love him. But each year I managed to find a card and send it from wherever I was to where he was, which was always 3728 Richard Lane. I could, if I wanted to, see the cards I selected all those years because they are in a box in the closet in my house. My father saved all of them. I brought them home with me after he died.
We find out too late how much people mean to us and how much we meant to them, or that we meant anything at all to them. The last time I saw my father alive, in the spring, he was bedridden and mostly silent. I made him my mother’s chicken parmesan, one of his favorite dishes, which I didn’t want him to eat from a tray sitting up in bed. I wanted us to have a meal together at the table. It took two of us to get him out of bed and into a wheelchair.