Dear Dad.

Dear Dad

Father’s Day has never been then celebratory event that it should be in our family. I think if I had kids of my own I would expect more from Father’s Day. Sorry dad. So this year I plan to make it up to you. Before I do, however, let me take a minute while I have the floor (or desk chair as it may be) and properly thank you for the job that you have done over the years. Yes it has been quite a few years. You have been a father for 35 years and 33 of them have included me.
You have been the sole provider for your family during the entire run through your career as a designing engineer. As you chased your career through the ever shrinking automotive designing world in Flint and Detroit you always found a way to take care of us. You raised us through some of the toughest times in America for the working class, the Reagan and Bush years and you did it with dignity. You were always first to work and last one home because you knew that overtime made the difference between hot dogs and Pizza Hut.
Holy shit, dad! You even took a night job as an unarmed security guard in Flint at the Little Ceasers on Clio and Pearson Rd. in Beecher. I was in 5th grade and didn’t realize at the time that you were defending a useless cause in a war zone. I could not even fathom taking on such a role. Later you would lay awake at night knowing that your youngest son was doing the same thing but he was surviving in Falluja. Just like you made it through Vietnam, your youngest son survived Iraq and has been reunited with his family. I hope that one of these days soon he will open up to you and treat you with the respect that you deserve. You know that he has a lot of pain in his heart that he can not share yet. I don’t understand as much as you do.
Throughout your life you did things by yourself. As an adult you had individual hobbies such as gardening and race walking. We used to gather in poking fun at you while you walked but you persevered. You had to stop accepting 1st place trophies from races because you had no more room for them. Good luck with the Baltimore Marathon this fall. It will be nice to see how many runners you beat. I know it will be a lot.
As alone as you may have felt in your life you were always a family man first and always there for us. Weather you were at work or at school plays it was for us. Through whatever life threw at you there was always a way through it and back to your family. When you had to leave Michigan and take work in Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania it was the first time that you had been away from mom since Vietnam. How did you get your soup heated up?
I’m glad that you made the trip and discovered this area for yourself. Your decision to retire out here has been a benefit for me in so many ways. Like you I don’t want to be far from my family. In 3 years after your move to MD we have the entire family living out here and we are all doing better. Your children don’t have to be stressed with no real jobs in MI as MD looks like the fertile crescent of jobs compared to what we grew up around.

So this year is on me. Come on out to the house, relax, we’ll put some flesh on the grill and SueSue is making her chicken-bacon sammiches. We can just hang out. In fact I’ve created a neighborhood festival in your honor. OK, so everyone else calls it Honfest but they chose this weekend because it’s Father’s Day and they knew you would enjoy it. So come on down, bring the little woman if ya want ( I love you, Mommy) and just relax for the day. We’ll head up to Zissmos and score the cheap beers while people outside are paying $5 a pop. You can live it up and eat more dead flesh on a stick. Then we’ll walk back to the house and laugh the rest of the day away because you know family stories aren’t far away. Mom still has a few stories to embarrass me with.

And next month when your birthday rolls around we’ll take the light rail down to Camden Yard because the Tigers are in town. You’ll like that one even better.
Happy Father’s Day dad. I love you.