Father’s Day seems to sneak up on me. Perhaps because of late, my father, having retired, is off in the sticks of Ecuador attempting to construct a parallel life, retrace a fork in Borges’ garden labyrinth before the path he chose 40 years ago brought him north with dreams of El Dorado and a family in tow.
So when my daughter snuck into the bedroom to wake my wife, the two having conspired to make me breakfast in bed, I momentarily felt a sense of anxiety as to my role as father (lay in bed and wait for the parade of breakfast entrées and kisses) and son (track down my father somewhere in the hinterlands of the south to wish him a good day).
As a son, good wishes and an unspoken sense of forgiveness is all I can offer, having accumulated enough years to know better than to judge, and too old to give in to the pull to get him a bottle of Old Spice, his closet, I’m sure is full of an endless supply accumulated over my childhood years, when Zachery’s Drugstore was owned by a man named Mr. Zachery, and places like CVS and Walgreens did not yet exist.
Real eggs (not the eggs whites I force myself to like on hot breakfast mornings), multigrain toast (because white bread it evil – and full of corn), strawberries, and the perfect café con leche landed on my lap, capped by my daughter’s eyes full of pride as I howled down the feast. A card from her with a poem all her own about dada now made it my turn to beam with pride at this 9 yr old wonder. My wife, sensing the overload of red in my tie collection wisely got me a funky blue tie and a very cool Orvis fly box.
According to Lina, May 23rd is Intergalactic Kid’s Day (“dada, kids don’t have a day of their own,” she let me know back in May), which requires a list of FUN things to do that kids must write up and parents MUST follow, so she insisted I write up my own list of things to do for Father’s Day.
Sleeping in was not allowed. Still recovering from a day of kayaking out by the mouth of the Connecticut River, riding the current in a Native Watercraft Ultimate 14.5, I tried to think of low impact things to do, and really, fun things to do since Lina would be passing judgment over the list. Home Depot was certainly out of the question.
I let her jump start the list, and at the end I couldn’t tell who listed what, with the following: go see Marmaduke, have pizza for lunch, bbq kabobs & corn for dinner. Also making the list; launching a newly assembled Estes rocket – a childhood obsession of mine that seems to have rubbed off on my little Sith. Bike riding fell off as did the silent whispers of
Diary Queen that Lina vainly tried, using Karate Kid mind control tricks on me. I did manage to catch a nap and finish James Dodson’s Faithful Travelers, which left me saddened by Dodson’s fate, but refocused my own mental energy as father, husband, and son. In the end I called my father, dialing a foreign cell number but finding him on the other end, washing an SUV that I told him needed the dirt in order to keep from falling apart. The Farias men approach the X-axis of emotional truth, but never quite reach it. It’s a strange calculus that I work hard to keep from happening with my wife and daughter. With every turn, another forking path in the garden appears, bringing us closer to infinity.
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