Father’s Day is a bittersweet holiday for me. Of course, I try my best to make sure my husband has an amazing day but, having lost my father at a critical age, the holiday sometimes makes me feel a little lost.
His death seemed so sudden, but when I look back on the years wasted at the bottom of a bottle, I’m not so sure about that. My father was a creature of excess. He drank hard, smoked heavy, and ate well, but what did all that excess bring him? Forty-seven years high on the hog, and nineteen buried under ground.
He never got to see me grow from a stupid kid into a responsible woman.
He didn’t give me away when I married my high school sweet heart.
He never got to hold his first grandchild -- a kid who bears such a striking resemblance to him that it steals my breath at times.
He missed everything.
My dad was a hard man to love. If you’ve read Pretty Reckless, Kat’s love/hate relationship with her own father runs a seamless parallel to the one I had with mine but, like Kat, I choose to remember the good stuff. The parts of him that remained human after the booze wore off. His flaws were merely a small part of what made him him.
He was a goofball.
A romantic.
A shrewd business man, and the best damn car mechanic there was.
A guy who cried at the end of Leave it to Beaver.
A lover of Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and old black and white westerns on television.
A dad who worked hard, kept us fed, and made sure we never wanted for anything.
So, I dedicate this blog post to my daddy, and all the daddies out there celebrating today. S 'agapó bampáka. Eftychisméni Iméra tou Patéra.
Happy Father’s Day!