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Dear ole dad
Sunday, was Father’s Day. My own father passed away in 2009. During the last year of his life, he was lonely and missed his “girlfriend”, my mother. Mom died the year before and for just over a year, we stood by watching as Dad slowly sank into a heartbroken and heartbreaking kind of depression. Patrick Durning was a good man. He was a pretty good dad, as far as being a dad goes. The seven of us loved him because he was a “teenager at heart” until the end. He loved a good joke, especially if it were a corny joke. He loved being with his best friend, my mom’s brother Joe. He loved to travel. He loved his kids. He loved to skate in the park with us the moment the ice was in. He got each one of us up and pedalling on the junker of a bike we all shared, running behind us, holding the seat while we struggled to find our balance. He was a “mathmagician,” and when pressed into homework service, he helped make sense of formulas, equations and ratios. He let us build forts in the yard with scrap wood and all of the bent nails we could handle, he even let us use his “second best” tools for our projects. One summer, he didn’t bat an eye when he came home to the crater that three of us had excavated in the backyard to create our own inground swimming pool. Did I mention he was a bit of a rebel? Wait, he was a rebel, through and through. He certainly wasn’t a fan of the socalled pecking order, authority or of trickledown anything, especially economics. He didn’t hesitate to let people know if they were unfair, unkind or wrong. He loved his great big, noisy family. Together with our mom, he worked hard to keep all seven of us clothed and fed and housed. He played hard. He lived, every day, with the memories he carried home from his time during WWII and he tried not to let any of that nightmare and trauma spill over into his family life. But, of course, it did. We were boomer kids. All of our parents were Depression- era raised and matured by a world war.
Dads, right? As sure as we live and breath, we all had one. Some people I know had great dads, others had dads who were just dads because they happened to be present at conception, and others had everyday kinda dads. In the big scheme of things, the seven of us were fortunate. We got one of the good ones. While I’d like to believe my dad treated each one of us the same, he didn’t. He “daded” each of us the way we needed to be treated. Sometimes I sort of wish I had been a Daddy’s girl, but I wasn’t when I was young. My older and my younger sister were the Daddy’s girls. It wasn’t until I was an adult I became Dad’s girl. He and I shared similar interests in art, architecture, politics, food and cars. Go figure. His passion for great engineering and design made sense to me. And he understood my love of community museums and great libraries. As I got older we became more “simpatico”.
On Father’s Day, I miss my dad. Actually, I miss my dad all the time. I wish our children and our grandchildren had had the chance to know him just a wee bit better. I wish they’d know the younger, more vibrant man he was. He was kind of cool in a crazy old Vans wearing, cream soda drinking, icecream lovin’ kinda way. Today, I am grateful I had a pretty good dad. Today, I am grateful for the man who is the LOML who took the time to show our sons how to be good fathers. It’s a good day.
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