Poems for Father's Day

My father's workshop smelled of pine and something electrical— the ozone ghost of a drill pushed harder than it wanted to go. He built things that almost worked: a birdhouse with a door too small, a shelf that held its books at a slant that made Hemingway lean into Dickens as if sharing a secret. He measured twice, cut once, and swore once more, and I sat on the upturned bucket and handed him the wrong screwdriver with the confidence of a surgeon's assistant who has never seen a surgery. What I learned there had nothing to do with wood: it was the permission to be not very good at something and to keep showing up with your hands and your coffee and your badly drawn plans and your belief that tomorrow's version would be closer. He was right about the shelf, in the end. Hemingway and Dickens got along fine.

You never asked for a day. That's the most father thing about you. You didn't want a card or a tie or a breakfast in bed that tasted like effort and love in equal parts. You wanted the game on. You wanted the house quiet enough to hear the announcers and loud enough to know your family was in it. Father's Day is a holiday for the men who don't need holidays. The ones who show up at 6 a.m. to a job that doesn't love them back and come home to a house that doesn't know how close they came to not being able to keep it. You taught me by not teaching. You taught me work by working. You taught me patience by waiting for me to figure it out when we both knew you could have done it in half the time. You were not a man of words. You were a man of showing up. Of oil-stained hands and early mornings and the particular silence of a man who says I love you by checking the tires before a long drive. I didn't understand this at sixteen. I understand it now. So here's your card. It's a poem. You'll probably say: you didn't have to. And I'll say: I know. That's the whole point. Happy Father's Day, Dad. The game is on. The house is loud. You did it. We're all still in it.

My father fixed the loose gate, the lamp with the stubborn switch, the bicycle chain that bit my thumb. Feelings were harder. He brought a screwdriver, stood beside the broken sentence, and asked where it hurt. Years later I understand: he loved by staying near the problem, turning it gently, trying every tool he had.