In the three-plus decades I’ve been writing columns, I wonder if I’ve ever written a Fathers Day column before the holiday. Well, why mess with tradition?
Maybe it’s the writer gene in me, but I was born an observer, and I saw the differences in the way my grandparents parented, how my father learned from them, and me from him. They loved their kids but any shows of affection were understated. But each generation evolves.
I have a sense that Dad was a bit spoiled, or at least didn’t wont for much. He had cars! I had to carjack our ‘67 Chevy station wagon. It had a 396, laid rubber, and though sluggish off the line, could take most of the sports cars in town.
I was the first of six kids. Before we go on, it’s my observation that kids are who they’re going to be when they’re born, so my folks would have been better off if the eldest was someone civilized and smart like my sister Sherry. Instead they got a respectful renegade—a psychiatric term, I’m sure.
I was going to break the rules, accept the punishment—often two weeks of being grounded—and then I’d do it again. My parents were horrified at the thought of having six of me, but they needn’t have worried, only Joel, the second to last, was a rebel. Such a snotty teenager he even managed to offend me. I think part of the reason he got away with more is because they were flat-out pooped by then.
I think if I had been a young father when Dylan was born, I think I would have gone the drill sergeant way. However, it was obvious very early that he was, as the Lakota call them, Heyoka, a contrarian. Dylan sometimes makes an attempt to contradict that description to which I respond, “Dylan, you crawled backwards!” He was noisy and energetic, a typical boy in that regard, and he tallied so many stitches, I once got a call from Child Protective Services after Dylan had smacked his forehead on the kitchen counter overhang at full speed. They wanted an explanation. “He’s a boy,” I said.
The standard discipline tact—“Because I said so.”—wouldn’t have worked on Dylan. Reason worked. A conversation, an explanation, did.
Now, India… sweet, little, smiley India, was a different case. Defiant. Stubborn. Petulant. If I ever won a match it could be attributed to her benevolence. She still scares me.
I wonder about the strategies and genetics of those who preceded us. Grandpa Bender was easy-going, good-humored and rarely lost his temper. Grandpa Spilloway was stoic but when he was unhappy with you, his steely gray Russian eyes demanded attention.
Years ago, when I was working radio, a sometimes tense occupation, I threw a recorded “cart” against the wall that was advertising something that had already happened, and as tape unfurled like a New Years celebration, I stomped out of the studio spewing expletives. Everyone scattered. Even the General Manager ducked into his office.
“Curious,” I thought, as I strode back into the studio and caught my reflection in the glass. Those eyes. That steely Russian look. I was looking at my grandpa. Ah. I’ll confess that I’ve used that look as necessary ever since. It moves mountains. Slays dragons.
Sometimes I hear my father if I snort when I laugh. It’s hard to believe I’m older than he ever got to be. The dynamic of fathers and sons changes, and I regret that I lost him when we were just becoming friends, a relationship that was man-to-man. I remember especially one day we cruised the backroads looking at towering cornstalks, just talking, laughing, and getting to know sides of each other that had been hidden.
I doubt he knew how much of him was in me, in the way I approached the world. Like all fathers do, he worried about me, my willingness to take career chances, my defiance.
“Sometimes you have to put up with some s—t,” he told me once.
“Oh, yeah,” I responded, “When exactly did you ever do that?”
For better or worse, my kids will take the lessons I didn’t even know I was teaching and build on them. They’ll be better at parenting than I’ve been. Exactly as it should be.
When I congratulate a new father I invariably say, “It’s the best job in the world.”
© Tony Bender, 2024
