When our daughter and son were in pre-school classes, I always got a handicraft gift for Father’s Day. A card, a painted rock or something of the like, that my child could give to me on Father’s Day. The gift wasn’t so important. It was the pride and joy that emanated from the giver that warmed my heart and made me glad to be a dad.
It is has been about 20 years since I received a handmade gift from one of my children. But now, in the year 2012, it has only been a day since I received a handmade gift.
My daughter came over for Father’s Day to spend some time with her dad. That alone is a good gift but she upped the ante. As I sat down in my chair she says, “Dad, I have a card for you but before I give it to you, did you read Zits today?” I hadn’t so I checked my online newspaper source and read Zits. As an aside, my daughter says the characters resemble my wife, me and our son. She’s right. I even look like the dad. We must have the same barber.
Then, as I am chuckling about the comics, my daughter hands me my homemade, handicraft card. She had been at coffee with her boyfriend earlier in the day and she realized she didn’t have a card for me. There was nothing at the coffee place that would work. So she decided to put her creative juices to work.I have a homemade card! A piece of cardboard, about 8 ½ by 11 inches, as the backing and several pages stapled to it. The cover has a picture, cut out from a magazine, of Kermit the Frog and some singer singing into an overhead studio mike. The handwritten message on the front: Celebrating you! On Father’s Day.
Inside there is another cutout picture of a somewhat bald man leaping into a pool of water that is surrounded by rather large rocks. The picture has a cutout word taped to it. voice This leads me to believe that the man is screaming in fear as he leaps from a very high ledge into the water. Something I would never do. The leaping, that is. Screaming is a given. The words surrounding the picture read, "Through the wild ride of fatherhood you managed to help me find my own voice. It’s a brave dad who lets his children be themselves. Scarier than any great heights. Thank you for listening to my voice.”
Five pages of The New York Times Magazine crossword puzzle are next. The cardboard backing provides a nice support for my heavy hand as I write the answers in the hundreds of little squares. The perfect gift for a puzzle solver.
Lest you think my son forgot me, he says to me, after wishing me the greetings of the day, “I have a card for you, Dad. Just like the one I gave Mom for Mother’s Day. It is perfect. You just switch the word father for mother.” It is the perfect card. I picked it out for him to give to his mother for Mother’s Day. It fits him where he is in life right now. The perfect card, only he never signed it or gave it to his mother. He is saving it for next year. So I did get the same card as his mother. The difference being that I have seen the card. My wife knows that it exists.
Later in the day we went as a family to see Men in Black 3. A movie on Father’s Day is our family's tradition. My daughter sat next to me. In one scene in the movie Will Smith’s character, J, is standing on a gargoyle at the top of a New York skyscraper. My love for high places took over. Fortunately, there was this comforting hand on my arm, letting me know that I would be okay. To paraphrase my daughter’s words, “Through the wild ride of fatherhood… It’s a brave daughter who lets her dad be himself…even though he is scared of great heights, real or imagined. Thank you for listening to my voice.”