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A DAY FOR MOST FATHERS

I’m not a father, but I try to imagine what Father’s Day feels like each year. Most notably, for my own dad who has seen the same holiday roll around for 36 years. While television commercials and website cookie ads shove every morsel of “it’s time to celebrate dad the RIGHT WAY” in the guilted faces of family members in search of gifts for dads, in the weeks preceding Father’s Day I happen to know that there will not be any celebrating on June 18. It was that way last year and the year prior, and I’ve often wondered why. Some dads like family togetherness and a hearty, grill-cooked meal. Others want a nifty gizmo to add to the household. And the rest just want peace and quiet.

But my dad, seemingly at this stage of fatherhood, wants nothing. At all.

Just normalcy.

Is it because there is so little to look forward to after 36 years of pretending to enjoy this nationally imposed holiday? Or did my sister and I ruin the novelty with gifts that were haphazardly scrounged for at the last minute? Or maybe the gifts were just too trivial to matter, like an electric tie rotator that has since been delivered to the dump, unused.

On a Sunday in June each year, I watch my dad endure the signed cards, feign joy as he eats the one meal of the year he didn’t have to prepare or cook himself, and then thankfully sigh as the day winds down with the usual routine of whatever On-Demand television has on offer. Then, he heads to bed, dreaming about the normal flow of his life that will resume the following morning that was so rudely interrupted.

On Monday, it’s as though Father’s Day never existed. Flash! A Men in Black Neuralyzer wipe of the previous day’s charades.

Just once, or maybe a bit more than that, I’d like Father’s Day to mean a bit more for my dad.

So, I bought him a pen.

***

THE FATHER’S DAY GIFT EQUATION

Ok, before you think this gift was a panic purchase (also true), it wasn’t. This wasn’t just any pen. It was the same pen model that I had been using for the past six months: the Pilot G2 Limited Matte Black Edition, the one with a squishy “Doctor Grip” of silicon near the tip of the metal barrel. 

Not only is it a good pen, but I happen to know that my dad LOVES pens. He takes them as “souvenirs” everywhere he goes (which is the nice way of saying he takes cheaply branded office supplies from banks and stores that aren’t tethered to kiosks or watched with surveillance cameras). His desk drawer is filled to the brim with every make and model pen from the past 20 years. 

Looking at the rows and rows of pens in the office supply aisle of the grocery store the day before Father’s Day, I imagined a new premium pen was what my Dad needed.

The thoughtful gift giving equation in my head went thus:

Something Dad Likes + Gifting Something Similar BUT Unexpected = Happy Dad Moment on Father’s Day.

Therefore:

Dad Loves Pens + The Pilot G2 Limited Edition is a Great Pen = Successful Father’s Day Gift

Based on the numbers, the pen was bound to be a smash hit. And I did it last minute and for just under 10 Dollars. I was quite proud of myself.

Until I was usurped by my mother.

***

THE GIFT OF GIVING BAD GIFTS

I find in the moments when someone is opening your very bad and unimpressive gift, there is a premonition that things are about to go poorly. 

My mother was in the process of handing my dad his gift in the living room, before anyone came for dinner. She did this purposely since it was a special gift, one that would mean a lot to him. She had told me about it for weeks, by then, how nervous she was to buy expensive things for my dad. But she couldn’t resist; she had found the perfect thing to give him. 

My dad had recently fallen back in love with old John Deere model tractors. My mother researched his lists of models already in his possession, an elaborate collection of tractor toys ranging back 80 years. She had gone through great pains to purchase this very rare tractor: the John Deere 1/16^th 620 with 555 Plow Precision Tractor Toy. 

In the living room, he opened the box.

Watching my dad open up something that is actually surprising and valuable to him is a like watching a farmer find a meteorite on his property that has just fallen from the sky. He took a long look at whatever it was in front of him, put his hands on his hips, stared at the object, and kept muttering, “Well, look at that.”

He had the same reaction when I gifted him an iPhone SE a few Christmases ago: He looked over the phone with stark confusion—not because he didn’t recognize the gift as an iPhone, but because he was confounded that something so expensive and needed should come into his possession outside of his own funds. He held his new iPhone like it was a strange alien relic that ought not belong to humankind.

Meanwhile, I stood off to the side and watched as my dad scratched his head over the surprise gift my mother had handed him. He appeared to be combing through dormant emotions such as joy and flattery that had been little accessed over the years.

It was then that I remembered the equation: “Oh, the pen!”

I retrieved it from its resting place and reentered the living room.

A few things to note: I didn’t wrap it. I’m terrible at wrapping and had run out of gift bags to conceal my lacking skillset. So, like a toddler proud of his scribbled crayon drawing, I handed my dad the pen still in its packaging and said, “Happy Father’s Day!”

One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. And finally four…

“What’s this?” he asked, thinking his son had just given him a pen as a Father’s Day gift.

“Your gift,” I said, acknowledging that I had, indeed, just given him a pen as a Father’s Day gift.

“Oh. Cool,” he said.

“It’s the one I’ve been using. I thought you would like it,” I said.

My dad continued looking over the John Deere Tractor on the couch, digging his fingers into the box to extract it from its squeaky Styrofoam casing. “I’ll have to test it out later.”

As in: It will look great on the pile of pens. In the desk drawer. Like all the others.

I grabbed the new pen and put it on the countertop, where I expected it to remain as a relic of Father’s Days past.

“I’ll get to it,” my dad said behind me as he wrestled with packaging, the Styrofoam squeaking to birth the cherished John Deere tractor into the world.

I went upstairs, hoping for a text from my girlfriend. Nothing.

***

SCHEDULE TANTRUMS

I’d argue what I’m about to write isn’t related to this past Father’s Day because it would be too embarrassing if it were true. But, since it is also a little true, I suppose it is necessary to explain.

To make a long story short, I was disappointed that I didn’t deliver on a better gift for my dad. It was the lack of thought and effort I put into getting something for him, I think, and not how impressive my gift was compared to my mother’s. Still, it irked me. 

It irked me all the more when I hadn’t heard from my girlfriend for most of the day.

That’s when the irking mutated into a schedule tantrum.

I think we’ve all had schedule tantrums to an extent, but I’ll define it here clearly:

A Schedule Tantrum is when we expect others to behave as we see fit and on our own biased schedules.

When someone doesn’t text in the timeframe we feel they should; when someone doesn’t show up “on time”, or if someone doesn’t act predictably as they should have…we go berserk. We then throw tantrums, behave like children, and all without asking a single question to find out what’s going on with this other person. We’re just mad at them for not anticipating our secret and silent needs, which we perceive to be objective and true.

I checked my phone again. No reply. The tantrum was building.

***

MILKSHAKE

My girlfriend had been camping with her roommate and was to stop on her way home to see me. She was up north, in a place without cell reception, which was irksome enough, but then there still wasn’t any plan.

And I had made one, in secret, in my head: The plan was for her to tell me her plan. And I had yet to hear of a plan, which wasn’t the plan. My plan.

(You can see how this is idiotic in hindsight)

By the time she and her roommate were on their way to meet me, I was long past annoyed. Didn’t they know they were running behind? Didn’t they know that they should have visited sooner at night? I knew which decent hour they should have visited and it was getting late. Didn’t they know this?

Of course, you can predict how things went when we met that night: a classic cold front of short visits and unsaid things, mostly on my end.

When I arrived home from meeting my girlfriend, I sat down with my parents and told them about all the grievances I had.

I said things like, “How could she not check in sooner?” and “It’s not like I can just sit around all day.”

“Why, did you have anything else you wanted to do today?” my dad asked.

I grunted. That was beside the point. He was right. But this was also beside the point.

The point was that even though my girlfriend ended up visiting town like she said she would, things weren’t copasetic after she left. She knew I was unhappy about how the day went—she had seen the adult throwing a schedule tantrum.

Ding. Dong.

Suddenly, the doorbell.

I opened the front door of the house and there was my girlfriend. She was supposed to have been on her way home. That was 40 minutes ago. Here she was, standing on the doorsteps with a chocolate milkshake from Culver’s in her hands.

“Hi,” she said. “This is for you.”

I took the milkshake. “Thanks.”

“I just wanted to make sure everything was ok.”

We kissed. I said yes, even though it would take a few days to recognize that I was acting like a child in this moment.

She left, finally heading home with her roommate. I entered the living room with the chocoloate milkshake just delivered to me.

“Where did you get that?” my dad asked.

“My girlfriend. She just handed it to me.”

“After all that today, she just hands you a milkshake?”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

“Well, doesn’t this make for a grand Father’s Day!” my dad said with a wide grin.

This was just as shocking as the milkshake. “Why?”

He shrugged. He took a pen from his pocket, a Pilot G2 Black Matte Special Edition pen, and clicked it a few times. “You just never know what surprises you’ll get.”

All three of us shared the milkshake, my parents flattered that someone would go to such lengths to see if her tantrum-throwing boyfriend was ok. I remember my dad laughing a lot while spooning melted gobs into his mouth.

Since Father’s Day, I’ve thought about why my dad found such delight from a late night milkshake delivery, and the best I can make of it is this:

Fathers are most fond of those things that they have helped create, purposefully or not, in this world.

In this instance, he saw his son, aged 34 and still blind to his toddler tantrum tendencies, receive a gesture of kindness from someone who appears to very much care about him. I think the sly smile was because he recognized, more than I ever could at the time, that the milkshake was the unexpected gift that mattered most that day.

A gift that wasn’t even meant for him.

“You two can fight all you want,” my dad said between spoonfuls of milkshake. “So long as she brings more milkshakes.”

He clicked his new pen. “I should write that one down.”

***

1. “Paresthesia” by Wild Ones
2. “Losing My Mind” by Montaigne
3. “Thunder In The City” by Future Generations

***

Wishing everyone as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,