Shopping for Father’s Day cards is tough. Even at a nice stationery store, my daughter proclaimed, “Father’s Day cards are always kind of cheesy.” She’s right. Their covers are illustrated with golf bags or fishing tackle, a sailboat or an armchair quarterback, as if everything about dads can be summed up in their favorite hobby. As if to say: “The perfect memory of my dad is when he wasn’t spending time with me.” And what if Dad does none of those things? Does that make him less of a dad?
Wouldn’t it be nice if every card could be customized for the special relationships that dads have with their children? My children would choose a card with Dad and them at the swimming pool, floating on boats they wove of neon foam noodles. Or a card with all three of them dunking Easter eggs in dye cups, striving for the deepest rainbow combos and emerging with purple and orange thumbs. Or a card with them in their pajamas, sitting on either side of Dad every evening as he read the “Wizard of Oz” by Frank L. Baum, the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and the Harry Potter books (only through the fourth one — at which point our son began making his own movies and our daughter decided that Harry’s character was annoying).
It was especially difficult for me to pick a card for my father, because he never did anything depicted on those greeting cards. A certified public accountant and law school professor with 10 children doesn’t make tee times.
For me, memories of my father are really found in the moments we were able to share. On road trips, after the sun had set and more of the family had drifted off to awkward sleep in the station wagon, Father instructed me to count the green roadside markers that bore odd dots and digits. He told me when to start, and I did so dutifully. As I got to the ninth sign, Father quickly told me to watch for the 10th one, because it would be different. That’s when Father explained to me about tenths, and how each stretch of road was marked by a tenth of a mile, and that 10 tenths made a whole mile, and the bigger sign showed how many miles we were into the state. Sometimes he’d invite me to share a gumdrop or a bumpy Boston Baked Bean from the little plastic bags of Brach’s candy he kept at his side to help keep him awake.
At home, Father would nab me as I tried to tiptoe past his study, avoiding his requests to fetch him an apple or a soda pop. “It’s time to match up gas station slips,” he’d say. Before I knew it, I would be totally engrossed in the task, hunched over a pile of inky carbon copies from Chevron and Phillips 66 next to his reading chair. I was to match the serial numbers of Father’s gas receipts to the pile sent with his bill. All the carbon receipts had to match the originals, or Father would know that there was fraud afoot. I would work for hours matching those sequences of numbers, so satisfied as I shared my success pair by pair and whittled down the pack.
Any time I wanted Father to take us to a movie, I had to locate its review in the huge stacks of New Yorker magazines in the corner of our living room. It had to be a full review, and then he would judge its worthiness. It’s amazing we made it to any movies at all, but we did, because I remember marching right back out of the Mayan Theatre a few times during the “Klute” era.
On power hikes in Estes Park, we quickly learned that if we didn’t keep up, we would miss brownies and cherries at Bear Lake. Somewhere along the way, we learned to love the dust that covered our boots and the chipmunks that scurried in our wake.
How could I ever find a Father’s Day card that reflected all that?
So I often had to resort to making my own Father’s Day cards, and urged my children to do so as well. Construction paper and crayons are the way to go when there is no perfect card for the dads who near perfection in their children’s eyes. Custom-made cards work best because dads don’t always get full credit for the time they are able to spend with their children after stressful days, forever responsible for some or all of the family’s wage. Custom-made for the fathers who fuel imaginations, who teach math, who train throwing arms, who model morals and build character.
Custom-made cards for the dads who might have to make their divided time count for even more.
And the best custom-made message? That’s up to you.
Lucy Ewing (lucyewing@comcast.net) is an elementary school teacher and parent in the Boulder Valley School District.
