Fathers Day

Some six or eight years ago now we had our best pals over for Sunday dinner who arrived with seven young children. The littlest, just three years old, approached me in the kitchen as the parents drank their drinks and talked their grownup talk. Did I have any toys anywhere? she wanted to know.  I dropped everything and took her to the a room upstairs where still slept the wooden blocks and the Fisher Price cash register and the Lego people with their funny round heads. The other six were hot on our heels and soon we were ringing up sales and arranging tiny schoolrooms and building beds for more stuffed animals than you could shake a stick at.We'd been playing with them for 10 or 15 minutes, when this littlest one, this three-year-old, nodded her head toward the stairs leading back to the kitchen and casually asked, as if I too were a child of three, “Which one is YOUR daddy?” She meant, “Which one looks after YOU, when you really need what a father can give?“  I didn’t even hesitate.  “The one with the white hair,” I said. We both smiled then, she for all the fun we were having, and I, fatherless from birth, for what she had given me: the fresh realization that a love begun as late as adulthood yet can heal the oldest wounds.And so Happy Fathers Day to all and a  belated blessing on the blue-eyed man who left before I came, wherever he may be today: and more blessings yet on this brown-eyed man with the once-dark hair who has stayed and stayed, and fathered quite a few people in his strong and quiet helping way.