Father’s Day

Every Father’s Day I wake up unhappy. Stay unhappy all day. Don’t know why. And remember it’s Father’s Day and my father is dead. He had a pretty long great life. He left behind a loving family, I talk to my brothers just about every day.

We saw it coming. He got cancer. He was given six months to live and he lived 15 more years. He came out to stay with me. Got to see my place, meet my friends. I got to say goodbye to him before he died. I’m still sad he’s dead. I’m sitting here in a coffee shop and I half want to cry typing about him. But they’re playing EDM.

He had a long great life. At 17 he got arrested for attempted murder. My uncle paid off the judge to get him sent to the Marines instead of jail. He got sent to Camp Pendleton. Got out of going to Vietnam. He was an artillery mechanic. They gave him a standardized test, saw he was mechanically inclined. He was pipefitter like my grandfather at first and then a carpenter. A master union carpenter, which he was proud of.

He met my mom on a hike in the Blue Hills somewhere. Slept with her in her sleeping bag that night. They took a trip across country in a ’49 Ford truck he restored, to absolute mint. I remember that truck, gleaming black with a red interior. She told me about him blasting the heat trying to keep it from overheating over the Rocky Mountains. One thing he told me from that trip is never go to New Orleans. I haven’t.

He had scars on his wrists from scrubbing off tattoos with a wire brush. I’ll never get a tattoo.

He went to almost every state in the country. Sometimes getting away from the law. He told me some gas station attendants refused to serve him and his friend in the South because they had long hair, so he went back and stole all their tires.

He’d take me up to New Hampshire to see my cousins, up to the lake, and the kids sat on the shoulder part of the back seats in his Buick Skylark convertible whipping around dirt roads fast playing Kenny Rogers and the Village People YMCA. I’m gonna cry in the coffee shop thinking about this. He helped us make a fort in some huge rocks and hang up an old shirt painted with our name for a flag. He’d wait till the kids were swimming, cover himself in mud and weeds and jump out of the trees as a swamp monster.

He woke up before dawn and carried me down to the truck where he’d put cushions in the back of the super cab. So I could sleep on the way there. Wake up at the lake.

He cut the tip of his thumb off working for Bethlehem Steel. I think he got cancer from his work on construction sites, steel mills.

I miss my dad. He wrote me letters by hand once in a while. Sent me a check on my birthday and an update on his dog and his Cadillac. I miss him, I miss him. He didn’t like cats but he learned to like my cat, and my brother’s cat. He’s taking care of my pets in the afterlife.

He would have loved you. He would have loved the way you make rings. He would have loved watching you work on the metal and polishing it. He would have built you a workshop in our new house with tables at the perfect height for you, work spaces in the perfect place for your hands. He would have loved you and god damn would he have loved the dog. And the dog would have loved him. I’m almost sadder for her than for me.