Dad. Locally Ranked.
Which park was it? Somewhere in North Georgia, where there are a lot of heavily wooded state and national parks, me, Brett and Scott found a park bench covered in knife graffiti. Scott and I, just out of high school in 1991, had driven from Chicagoland in my 1983 Datsun. Brett's family had moved in 1988 and we stayed in touch.
On the bench, in giant, jagged scrawl, the kind you can only really make with a Bowie knife in pressurized wood, it read FATHER'S DAY, way out of proportion to all the pocket-knife hearts and initials. We invented a story, an adult shrieking as he carved in the words over a father he never knew. Scott lost his father at age 5, but I don't remember anyone revealing anything personal over the graffiti. In fact, this may have been the same trip in 1990, with me and Jim, no Scott.
Either way, it turned into a running joke, "FATHER'S DAY" fake-screamed in fake anguish, an imagined graffito carving his tears into permanence for us to feel, the way the best art does.
I kicked off Father's Day 2024 thinking about how lucky I am to be alive. I read today's The Small Bow — great and thoughtful, as usual — and, while not the point of the essay, learned that one thing AJ Daulerio and I have in common is a ruptured appendix and a giant “Frankenstein-looking scar". Mine went bad at age 11 and I got incredibly ill, but my mom got me to the hospital in a hurry. My older brother also had appendicitis — it's not hereditary, just a rare coincidence — so she was well aware what was going on. The hospital, however, took 24 hours to get me into surgery and my appendix ruptured along the way.
Over the years I've thought about how in nearly every other era of human history, I'd have died in 1985. I would have missed the Super Bowl Shuffle. (In Chicagoland, everything is Before Shuffle and In the Name of Our Shuffle.)
This morning, my my son referenced "The Hero's Journey" in relation to "Super Mario 3D" over pancakes. We argued over who invented the concept, Joseph Campbell or Dav Pikley. I also would have missed that.
So it had not occurred to me to write about Father's Day until I got on Substack this morning. My son said I could do what I wanted today, which means I'm at Radio East where the fact they're playing Father John Misty and Wilco must mean Spotify has a Dad Rock mix.
2022 doodle. I was trying a thing.
Sobriety is built on gratitude, and often on lists. There's a lot of paperwork. I journal a lot, and I'm regularly thankful that I didn't die or go to jail when I got my DWI, but there has to be more to life than "eh, it could be worse." Sometimes that means finding gratitude in that mixture of meaningful and interminable that's specific to parenting, like watching a school play or listening to the still-forming thoughts of a child learning new Exploding Kittens strategies.
But also, yesterday we watched Inside Out 2 (where the depiction of the anxiety of a 13-year-old girl really hit home for this middle aged man). On the way out my son was effusing about the film and his souvenir lunchbox at a super-shy girl, probably about 9, who finally said, in an accidentally too-loud way, that she loved it too. Her mom was visibly surprised. "She never talks to anybody!"
We had a regular at Mail Boxes Etc. in Porter Square in Cambridge who had Tourette's. When my boss was the one to help her with the copiers, she'd start cursing. Tourette’s is easy to imitate, it was just like depictions you’d see on TV. Whenever I helped her, she shouted "GOODY! GOODY!" with a high pitched squeal. I like to think that's meaningful, because it says something nice about my aura, and that I've passed it along to J, whether through nature or nurture.
I own a stuffed appendix
I didn't become a father till I was 44. Then my marriage broke apart, due to my alcoholism and bad choices, but also my ex-wife's inability to forgive me. I say that without judgment - she didn't have to forgive me, she would have had to forgive a lot and to do so would have required her to be an entirely different person. Thinking of who I was as a snarky teenager and 20-something, it still shocks me how important being a father is to me today.
My therapist occasionally notes that I never talk about my own father in our sessions. I love my father, he's a good person, we've had a lot of long conversations about creativity and the nature of art over the years. That's what I got.
Anyway, if you were at Radio East this morning and some blond kid asked to take your picture with his plastic camera, he was out making friends while his dad wrote this. I hope he got a smile out of you.
Wow. As ever, there is a rare mastery to how you string together seemingly loosely-connected threads into a beguilingly colourful and cohesive tapestry, the movingly profound mixed in with the skittishly inconsequential to such effortlessly evocative effect. There's also generally exactly one bonus mystery cultural/sporting reference for me to mull over/grasp semi-blindly at the meaning/origins of- today's is the 'Chicago Superbowl Shuffle'. I could of course presumably enlighten myself via Google in 2.5 seconds flat, but have no intention of doing so whatsoever, this being a course of action clearly lacking in the poetically mannered elegance all of your readers should strive to achieve. I salute you. Sir!
That depiction of an anxiety attack in Inside Out 2 was so real and so hard to watch.