2007.06.17 Fatheritude
I phoned my dad today. He's in the hospital, again. My mom called me yesterday to tell me that he'll have his cell phone on today so that I could call him. Which made it all that much more straightforward to have our usual awkward conversation.
It wasn't awkward because of anything that's wrong between us, though. We're both just terrible on the phone, and our combined terrible is so terrible that it's almost laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Not that either of us is comfortable enough on the phone to actually manage any real degree of mirth at the time. I'm sure he's chuckling over it as much as I am now, as usual.
It's kind of hard being so far away from him today. Not that I mean to live up to the great Father's Day of 2000, when I got him a GPS unexpectedly. It's more selfishly about how I want to soak in more of his fathering. You know, to witness and reflect on his fatherousness. Perhaps to peer into the mysteries of his fatheritude.
You see, it's all a bit mysterious to me. Even though I've been around throughout the entirety of his career as a father, I was never really conscious of how that interaction really worked. It was more than just that he was around, which is a minimum bar that a lot of father's fail. And it was more than that he was an active part of my life while I was growing up. Somehow, through guile or magic, I grew increasingly certain that I wanted to be like him. Not by any sort of act, either, because the more genuinely he was himself, the more viscerally I felt an appreciation for the man he was, and is.
Maybe that's just natural development. Or maybe it's just that he was the right sort of dad for a weird kid like me. I don't know. All I do know is that as I get closer to the realization that I'm possibly going to be a father someday too, the more I feel that I need to learn from him.
Because if my kid feels half as well prepared for genuinely living life as I did, I'll be proud.