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June 12, 2006
My father has been
gone for over ten years. It seems like yesterday…I miss him still.
He was a father
from the “old school,” an outdoorsman who took me out one freezing
morning on a duck hunting trip. At twelve years of age, I felt
honored that he trusted me enough to know I would be quiet and still
along the river bank.
As Father’s Day
nears, memories build of little things with big consequences. Daddy
loved order and strategy. An electrical engineer, he had a system for
ordering 1000 pieces by their bumps and slots, an assembly-line method
for putting puzzles together. Today, my color coded filing system
owes everything to Dad.
Perfectionists to a
fault, both of us, we had our fair share of rows. Particularly vivid
is one battle where we locked in an argument over how to slice
Mother’s homemade bread without leaving any breadcrumbs on the wooden
board. The battle turned into a war, complete with slamming doors and
morning apologies. Funny, today…fiercely serious, back then.
Poor Daddy. He
often joked about being the only man in the house surrounded by
women. When my mother took a college class on semantics and
discovered an additional set of connotations and denotations for every
word in the English language, she tripled the words at her disposal
for overwhelming him in conversation. It was the ultimate
Mars/Venus communication gap before John Gray was around to
explain it.
Remembering Dad, I
wish every kid had a father close at hand to create good memories.
Today,
statisticians are explaining why we need fathers. The value of dads
is computed in statistics of crime, risky adolescent behaviors, and
economic well-being. Researchers are trying to appeal to our logic,
arguing that families benefit from fathers…dads.
Why? What do
numbers have to do with explaining the longing of the human spirit?
The value of my dad is more personal than that, impossible to quantify
as a statistic.
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Today
psychologists and educators create classroom lessons teaching
children how to be nice to each other. They are working to teach
the very things my father taught me in the everyday details of
living together as family for over twenty years.
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Therapists help
women develop self-confidence in their abilities to problem-solve
and be self-reliant. I learned this from a father who let me watch
and help him fix my sewing machine.
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Spiritual leaders
preach forgiveness. I learned this from a father who knocked
quietly on my bedroom door and entered to tell me he was sorry. He
wanted to show me his technique for slicing bread without crumbs…but
it wasn’t worth fighting. And we forgave each other.
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Special funding
for special programs is directed to the promotion of careers in
science for women. My father showed me how to shape a wooden peg on
the lathe, he taught me his system for tracking the prices of stocks
and bonds, and he let me show him what I learned in an auto
mechanics class…how to change the rotor and adjust the timing on my
VW bug.
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Self-help gurus
write books and appear on Dr. Phil, preaching the techniques for
building healthy marriages. I saw this in the daily highs and lows
of married life between my parents where words spoken in anger were
covered over with apologies, forgiveness, and tenderness.
If I have had any
success in being a parent, I can look to my dad and the sacrifices he
made to be a husband and father. When family life is tough, I hang in
there because my Dad gave me a vision of tenacity and hope. When I
look for strength inside, I find it because my father put it there
through his affirmation of me as his daughter…worthy, capable, and
loved.
Dad’s
encouragement…his example…his love can never be replicated by social
programs and tax dollars. No number of psychologists, teachers, or
federally funded initiatives would ever have filled the shoes of the
man who loved my mother and spent a lifetime building a picture of
that love in the daily details of life.
I need no research
to prove the value of fathers for raising daughters and sons. The
proof is written on my heart. It is honored in passing on the gift of
marriage to our own children.
He’s been gone all
these many years. But he’s never left me. My Dad.
Happy Father’s Day!
Copyright © 2006 Jane Jimenez
June 13, 2005 A
Recipe for Families
June 18, 2004
Me Jane, You Tarzan
October 22, 2004
Bringing Poppa Home
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for past editorials.
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