Wednesday was a great day. I got some really great news at work, I got to have a year-end celebration with some of my favorite students, and then I got to be on one film set as an actor, and then another as a collaborator. Pretty great, right? I mean, big picture, most days are just mundane. Any ONE of those things would have made for a great day. Satisfaction guaranteed…
 
…yea…guaranteed.
 
Wednesday was also this: I didn’t get to see my kids. That sucks. While parenting is a real time warp where the days seem to never end but the years fly by, I genuinely don’t like when I feel like a figure that simply passes through their days sporadically. I don’t know if they see me like this, but I definitely feel like I see them twice a day in passing, giving light reprimands when they are required, but I’m basically an authority figure who makes them feel safe in short bursts. I feel like a live-in crossing guard.
 
Wednesday was also this: I was able to serve my wife by picking up our monthly glut of coconut milk that we get from the Asian market that’s on my way home, and we coordinated schedules regarding my visit to the chiropractor. We communicated details about upcoming events, relayed information regarding her degrading health, and I (probably insufficiently) expressed sincere sympathy for how hard it is for her to still run the home in her condition. It’s just where we are in life right now. Through no fault of her own, I sometimes feel like a live-in personal assistant.
 
Wednesday was also this: I had to hurry home to “take care” of a dead bird.
 
I had recently trimmed our tree in the front yard, and doing so had exposed years of overgrowth. The tree hadn’t been taken care of properly, so I’d slowly hacked back the branches that were choking each other out. Also—and I’m not your stereotypical lawn nut, but I’m starting to see how those guys get that way—the tree was killing my grass. Lawns are the final point of competition with nature for suburban middle class men, and I’m losing it badly. So, I trimmed the tree! And that exposed a dove’s nest. Which was made unstable by my horticultural hack-job. Which, during the rain storm that night, dumped a poor baby dove to the ground.
 
Ginny and the boys had seen it and wanted to do something about it. She knew you typically aren’t supposed to touch wild animals because it could lead to the parent smelling human and refusing to care for the baby any more. She called a bird rescue hotline, and was basically given a tongue lashing for trimming the tree and a lecture about how the number she looked up online was the incorrect number. She should have looked up the correct one online. Good call, government employee. Good call. The boys prayed for the bird, and went to bed.
 
She ended up calling me late last night to ask if I could bury the dead baby bird so the boys didn’t see it in the morning.
 
Crossing-guard-personal-assistant-guy to the rescue!
 
Now, there’s a lot going on here. I’d been at work overseeing a student film shoot, so I didn’t even get home until 1 AM. I need to take care of the litter box and take care of this bird, so I don’t exactly want to dilly dally. I get a spade from the garage and head out. Then I go back and get a flashlight because I don’t want to accidentally step on this bird’s carcass. That’d wreck my shoes, my day, and, frankly, this bird has had a bad enough day as it was. I’m lighting each individual step so as not to create dove pâté. I find the bird. Super dead.
 
Ok, now where to plant this poor sucker. As I’m hastily digging a shallow grave in my front yard flowerbed in the dark in the middle of the night, I get this subtle, inescapable feeling that I’m committing a crime. I mean, who else digs shallow graves in the dark at 1AM? Hand-rubbing, mask-wearing, evil-eyed criminals, that’s who! I go over to scoop up the poor little dove, and the wet, matted feathers, the tiny beak, and the delicate claws all look so…pathetic. It’s SO dead! No mother dove is hanging around mourning the dead baby. No news truck pulls up. Heck, my kids won’t even know this happened. He’ll simply be…gone. I flop the limp body into the dirt with a moist thump. Two scrapes of dirt over it, and then I stomp it down with my foot.
 
That’s when it hits me. As I pull my foot back from the dirt to reveal the waffled shoeprint on the crappy, silty swamp-dirt that is this impromptu burial plot I think, “Aren’t two sparrows sold for only a penny? But your Father knows when any one of them falls to the ground. Even the hairs on your head are counted. So don’t be afraid! You are worth much more than many sparrows.”
 
Wow. Well, I would certainly hope so.
 
Here lies the rotted, pathetic carcass of a poor creature with no marker to remember it by. It made very little impact on the world, and in just a few minutes it will be completely forgotten. In fact, that’s entirely the point of the unceremonious ceremony I’m taking part in…to help my kids forget it ever was. It will be like it never existed.
 
And that is exactly what happens to us.
 
Well, not exactly, but close enough. I’ll be buried a little deeper and, hopefully, not so late at night. But we create ceremonies, monuments carved of stone, and even family lines to try to not be forgotten. We want to mean something. We want to have made an impact. But, honestly, when all is said and done, I’ll end up exactly like that poor little bird. Another image that flashes before me in that moment is of some of the tomb stones we’d seen in Ireland when Ginny and I traveled there years ago. Memorials designed to create legacy, now too weathered to even read, lean haphazardly or are obscured by wild growth. No one remembers those people. It’s like they never existed.

A woman’s work is never done, and once a mom, always a mom. But a father’s job has a beginning, and an end, and we do everything we can in that middle part to make our sons good men.
 
I don’t remember being born, and for that both my mother and I are truly grateful. But I do know that I was born to a man who very often felt like he was in over his head. And I think if we were all being honest, that’s how every man feels when his role as a father is beginning. He grew into it, though. With my Dad, we always knew right where the line was, and we had complete freedom right up to it. And when we crossed the line, his justice was swift and thorough. But he did it out of love. He was really a gentle giant. He was a 6 foot 275 pound introvert. He was a pastor, and unlike pastors you see on TV, he was smart, good, honest, and he loved people so hard that it healed them.
 
But things weren’t always good between us. In my mind he became a real self-centered, ignorant, tyrant the year I turned 14. By the time I turned 18 and went to college he actually—again, in my opinion—got a little smarter. Then when I went away to graduate school and studied the arts (with his full, but non-financial support) he got really smart. We had great talks about humanity, and audiences, and how to honestly reach people effectively. Then when I got married he got a little insecure and immature, which was really weird to me because he had JUST gotten so smart again! And it’s really weird the moment you realize that in your relationship with your father there are times that YOU are the adult! And your justice has to be swift and thorough. But even in all of that middle part he was doing everything he could to make me into a good man.
 
By this time my wife and I were living in California, and my parents were in the Central Time Zone, so I would pretty regularly get phone calls from my well-intentioned yet forgetful mom at 6 o’clock in the morning. I’d answer, “Hello?” and she would THEN remember that we were two hours behind and say, “Oooooooh, sorry, sorry, sorry! Go back to sleep! I’m so sorry!” And then one day, she called at 4 am. And I already knew it wasn’t good. I picked up, and in a very flat and tone she kept emotionless so she could hold it together she said, “You father has collapsed in the bathroom. The ambulance is here now. They’re taking him to the hospital.” I was 25, he was 55. A few hours pass, I’m crying, my wife is holding me…my mom calls again. The same flat tone, “He’s had an aneurysm. They say they’ve never seen one this big before and he needs to be airlifted. What do we do?” Wait, you’re asking me? I’m not ready for this. I can’t make that decision. But here’s my mom looking to me to do that very thing. “I say we give him every chance we can.”
 
They airlifted him, he has brain surgery, he’s not waking up, and he’s not breathing on his own. I’m drowning in my own emotion. But my Dad had done everything he could in this middle part to make his sons good men. My two brothers and I fly out. The night I got there, my mom is in his room. It’s dark, it’s quiet, and it’s really, really cold. She’s whispering to me that when a blood vessel bursts in the brain, blood covers the brain cells and kills them. Then in order to repair the brain the body pumps the cranial cavity full of white blood cells to help heal it. The cold, the quiet, the hole drilled in his skull to let fluids escape, and a strict lack of physical contact is to minimize the brain’s responses to stimuli so it can focus solely on healing. She says, “I just want to crawl up there with him, and hold him, and tell him it’s going to be ok, but this is all I’m allowed to do,” and she kneels down next to the bed reaches out with one finger, and barely touches his hand…and she cries.
 
One of my brothers was in the Navy, so we only had a few days to do whatever it was we were going to do. My my mom and my two brothers and I sat down with the neurosurgeon, who explained that his brain was continuing to swell due to the extent of the damage, and that no matter what they did … he was going to die. We could ride it out or take him off life support. My mom and both of my brothers—both good men—turned and looked at me?
 
On July 16, 2006 we all came into his room, took some pictures, said our goodbyes, took out his breathing tube, and watched him choke to death.
 
We had to rush everything to get my brother back to the Navy in time. We were meeting with the funeral director across from St. Luke's Episcopal Church where we were going to bury him. The cheapest and fastest way was to cremate him. The dear, sweet funeral director was walking us through what the process was going to be. His body would be burned, but the bones wouldn’t, so those would be ground up. “He’ll come in a bag, about this big,” he says holding up his hands to indicate something exactly the size of a breadbox. And all four of us started to laugh. My dad was a fat man! I said, “That’s it? Won’t there be a candle or a bar of soap or something too?” This is how we dealt with stress. I still do.
 
He was eulogized by my brother, he was buried, and then somehow…inexplicably…life went on. Without him. His job was done.
 
And then, one day, my job as a father started. On our 5th anniversary, my wife woke me up by telling me that she was pregnant. I was shocked, I was scared, and I was really sad because this child would never know his grandfather. He'd know his other grandfather well, but not my dad. But I knew that I had to do everything I could in this new middle part to make my son a good man. All my dad-friends kept telling me about how amazing it is to hold your son for the first time and to feel the instantaneous elation and connection and love that ran unfathomably deep. Yes, from time to time, and with a beer in hand, men do talk about their feelings.
 
The day came. Contractions were had. My wife labored for 30 hours and pushed in active labor for 8. She was a warrior. And I was going to take my role by the horns just like she did. I was going to be a good dad just like my dad was. I helped pull my son into the world. I cut his umbilical cord, and I wrapped him in a towel, held him on my chest, and I looked in his deep eyes--anticipating that instantaneous and unfathomable connection--and I thought... “’Sup?” I had no idea who this dude was. He looked all pink and squinty, and he was covered with snot. We took him home, and he pooped on everything I owned. He would scream so loud through my face that my teeth would ache. He took complete ownership of my favorite of my wife’s parts, and he made me sleep on the couch. He was the worst roommate I’d ever had.
 
And I didn’t feel that instant connection. I thought I was broken some how. I wasn’t a good dad somehow. And it took me a long time. I hadn’t had those 9 months of being connected to him. I didn’t know what movies he liked, what music he liked, or his favorite beer. I didn’t know who he was.
 
But in time, as I did get to know him, and as I saw him learn all about the world by putting it in his mouth, I came to love him deeply. More than my self. I gave up sleep, the comfort of a bed, every preference I ever had about how our house was run, all my money, time, and all my everything. I very often felt like I was in way over my head, but my job had begun. He was my son.
 
Eventually my wife said she was ready for another. I’m thinking, “Are you sure that’s such a good idea? I don’t know how much you remember, but I was at ground zero. And now you want more? Of that? Again?” I was nervous. I didn’t want to feel like my emotions part was broken again. By now, my first son was also interested in what was going on with the baby inside Mommy’s tummy. He was smart, and curious, and had tons of questions. We told him everything that was appropriate for a 3 ½ year old to know. He was looking at pictures in maternity magazines and was fascinated by fetal development. He wanted to meet his brother so badly, and that just made it worse for me. I wasn’t even as excited as he was. Because, see, I remembered the pooping, and the screaming, and the pooping, and the not sleeping, and the pooping, and the vomiting, and…the pooping. I remembered holding him in my arms and wondering if I was broken for not feeling that instantaneous elation and connection and love that ran unfathomably deep.
 
The day came. Contractions were had. My wife labored for many less hours and pushed in active labor for only a few. She was, again, a warrior. And I was going to take my role by the horns just like she did? I was going to be a good dad just like my dad was. I helped pull my son into the world. I cut his umbilical cord, and I wrapped him in a towel, held him on my chest, and thought, “This is my son!” And I felt...that instantaneous elation and connection and love that runs unfathomably deep. A woman’s work is never done, and once a mom, always a mom. But my job had a beginning, and it will have an end, but I will do everything I can in that middle part to make my sons good men.

I'm not a writer. I'm just not. I always hear about "the greats," and the kind of discipline they show is astounding. I don't have it! I'm not one! I write when the muse beckons, and then I just don't. Anyone can do that!

That said, I have won local awards for my writing. One of my best friends in the whole world once said, and I quote, "Man, you REALLY have a way with words." (Emphasis his) That struck me. I kind of do. I've known that, but I've only ever been good in person. Never in writing.

Now, if one of my students came and told me that, what would I say? I'd say something like, "Nonsense. You do have a way with words, and you're ripping the rest of us off by not doing something about it," or, "Oh, really? Have you actually tried?" And then they'd say something that I'd probably generally ignore, and then I'd say something like, "Listen, whether you believe in you or not...I do. Please, don't let this gift slip away." Not that. Like that, but not that.

So, I should. I should write. I will try. I can't say it'll be good (of course it won't, but each time I do it'll suck a little bit less), and I can't promise that I'll be consistent. I do, however, owe it to myself to try. 

And so I will.

​I suggest you do the same.