One Father's Fathers Day

In my birth family the celebration of Mothers Day was distinctly muted, and Fathers Day got no notice whatsoever.  No specific and coherent argument was raised against it, but it was neither a traditional religious holiday nor a national patriotic one, and it just never became an actual thing as opposed to a convenient excuse for the Western Auto Store to advertise its tire sale.  I do remember one linguistic debate as to whether the proper form was Fathers Day, Fathers’ Day, or Father’s Day—all three of which appeared in a single tire advertisement.  A little anthropological research will soon reveal a probable connection of days dedicated to both mothers and fathers with various medieval Christian religious observances.  When I married an English woman, I became aware of Mothering Sunday.  I thought Mothering Sunday was a very cool name and almost certainly must have had something to do with the medieval cult of the Virgin, although in Britain it had become thoroughly Protestantized.  Fathers Day does have some antecedents in various festivals honoring Saint Joseph, though if its development had been a little more orthodox in terms of Catholic theology it would have been called Step-Fathers Day.  We find a related problem in the elaborate forty-two step genealogy at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel, though that has provided us with many marvelous artistic renditions of the beautiful “Tree of Jesse.”  In any event, it was only when both of our sons married delightful southerners, one from South Carolina and the other from Tennessee, that I started getting due acclaim for my relatively commonplace achievements as a progenitor.  I must say that I now find it very pleasant indeed to have salutes to my paternity coming in each year from various parts of the world.  Usually.

But this year the experience was doubly enriched by becoming, in effect, Granddaughters Day.  For an aging couple with shrinking social horizons we still seem to manage a fair number of conflicting obligations or opportunities.  Last week Joan spent several days at a kind of music camp with other members of her string quartet.  This is an annual event, scheduled months in advance, and it is rather intense.  Meanwhile our eldest granddaughter, Sophia, has a birthday just about now.  As it happens, so does her boyfriend Raymond.  So a plan developed.  There would be a joint birthday party for this winsome couple, very low-key, which would consist of a visit to check out their elegant and newly moved-into Brooklyn apartment, followed by dinner at a local eatery of repute, Frankie’s on Court Street.  The only fly in this fragrant ointment was the fact that Joan, still fully occupied with music making, would not be able to attend.  Thus it was decided that I would go to New York alone on Saturday evening.   And since travel is a little problematic for me these days, I didn’t want to try to go and return on the same day, and so elected to spend Saturday night at my daughter’s place on Washington Square, also the home of the two delightful younger sisters of the Birthday Girl.  So a grandfatherly clean sweep, of sorts, overnighted into Fathers Day.

The door-to-door transportation offered by the hail-riding companies is what makes such things possible.  It is expensive, of course, but not prohibitively so on an occasional basis.  This was my first unsatisfactory lift from Lyft.  The driver was an Arabic-speaker, a cheerful and voluble Egyptian, whose only certain word, or rather letters of English, was “GPS”.  His name was Ram, which had rather confused me, as I briefly expected the arrival of a Dodge Ram.  This seemed a little odd, but I am a nouveau uberite and Johnny-come-lately lyfter, and I would not have minded so long as I got to sit in the cab rather than the truck bed.  However Mr. Ram was actually driving a four-door Ford, which I had missed in the fine print.  But he had never before driven it or any other vehicle to New York, and his trusty GPS directed him by unconventional paths.  He was also a nicotine addict.  His first ploy was to offer me a cigarette in the utterly vain hope that I would collude with him in what was, I am sure, a breach of a cardinal rule of his employment.  But there was no collusion.  So censorious was my mien, indeed,  as to drive him to desperate measures.  When we got out on what might be called the open road, he began a program of surreptitious vaping.  It is not easy to vape surreptitiously, especially in an automobile.  The attempt required having both front windows wide open while operating the air conditioning at full blast.  Traffic was treacherous across Staten Island and onto the Verrazano.  Mr. Ram neither spoke English nor appeared to comprehend it in either spoken or written form.  I concluded that my best course was silent prayer rather than vehement remonstrance.  As we bumper-to-bumpered over the bridge he became visibly animated by the spectacular views, especially the glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, and waved his phone wildly with his right hand taking many photographs.  Altogether during this trip he may have had both hands on the wheel forty percent of the time.  But, as you are now my witnesses, I did live to tell the tale, to see Sophia’s nifty apartment, to have some transgressive calamari, and then to spend most of Sunday sedentary or actually prone on a luxurious couch at my daughter’s place.  Occasionally she, my son-in-law, or a granddaughter would briefly stint from their labors long enough to offer me a hot drink, or a cold one.  Eventually I was roused to a bowl of delicious tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich.  Now and again I read a few pages of something, or listened to a pod cast on my phone.  If you want to cosset a father on Fathers Day, you can forget the neckties and the cuff links, assuming that you’ve ever heard of a cuff link in the first place.  Just let the old guy lounge around on your couch for the day exuding his indeterminate fatherly aura.  Eventually it will occur to him that, as compared with Mr. Ram, he has had a pretty soft life.   He should count himself lucky that the paternal task of keeping bread on his children’s table never required him to drive around Cairo all day armed with only three words of possible Arabic: Alhambra, Aljazeera, and  al-GPS.