When I was young, and reading how-to books on how to write, I remember one author expounding on how young protagonists needed dead parents, absent parents, or abusive parents, so they could have the ability and motivation to go adventure. I remember thinking that was stupid, as plenty of kids all around me managed to have lots of adventures even with parents at home… and sometimes only because of the help and support of their parents.

It took growing up to see the advice wasn’t just stupid, it was lazy – writing absent parents is easier than writing supportive ones – and it was insidiously evil, as it kept reinforcing the “parents are awful or unimportant” message that schools tried to reinforce with “the state knows best; trust only the approved authorities, not your parents.”

So here’s to the fathers in our lives. The relationships will always be complicated as we grow up and grow older, because one of the great shocks of adult life is looking at “Mom and Dad”, and learning to see them not as “my mom and my dad”, but as two adults who have their own dreams, own hopes, own histories, own traumas and scars. Two people who were just trying to get through life and not make the same mistakes of their own parents, and do better for their children than they had… but end up making all new mistakes instead. And whose lives extend past being parents…

Last weekend I dropped everything and went up to help my father with a family thing. It was one of those “this meeting could have been a phone call, instead of short-notice plane tickets, hotel, and car rental”… but it was important to him that I was there in person, and I am growing uncomfortably aware that he is not, in fact, immortal. Better to drop everything and spend the time while he’s still here, as the day is coming when I’ll never have the opportunity again this side of heaven.

As we walked the edges of a corn field with his surviving cousins, they pointed to a small rise indistinguishable from the rest of the field. “Grandpa’s house used to be there. The gate was over there…”

“I can still remember painting that gate, every summer. The smell of linseed oil and white lead paint…”

“Do you remember the big rock? We were all learning to drive the car around it, except…”
“I did not hit it!”
“Yeah. The rest of us, he was saying ‘Go faster, go faster.’ You – he was saying, “Slow! Slow! Slow!”

The impact of one man still echoes in smiles and laughter, almost seventy years later… and in the relationship I have with his grandson, who tried to be as good a parent to me as he could figure out how. He did a really good job.

How to put that into a book… that’ a whole different challenge, but I will try to be up to it.

What books do you recommend that do fathers or fatherhood well?