Like Sandburg’s fog, Father’s Day sneaks in on little cat feet (2024)

Last week I sat down with the intent to write a column about Father’s Day, which snuck up on me as it always does. I needed to cogitate on it, so I closed my office door, cued up a new recording of Chaka Khan’s appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk series, and put my feet up.

I wasn’t hopeful of mining anecdotes. My father and I weren’t particularly close; I cared nothing for watching sports, and the one time he took me to the VFW golf course fell flat as soon as I realized I wouldn’t get to drive a golf cart, as Daddy always walked the course.

And my father wasn’t enthralled with popular music. He was more a Hank Williams-Ferlin Husky-Conway Twitty-Charlie Pride man. I cut my teeth on the Beatles and spent years listening to British Invasion music almost exclusively.

We didn’t share a lot of common ground, and that’s a shame. In hindsight, I might have tried harder. Upon his passing I inherited left-handed golf clubs, a bowling ball, heart disease, the aggravation of psoriasis, and an affinity for puns. And a few stories, most of which I’ve already told.

Rather than fall into the trap of repeating stories verbatim – I inherited that from my mother – I thought I’d share a column from a Father’s Day weekend past. If your mind is as porous as mine, you probably won’t remember it either.

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I never had any children, which is fine by me. I have enough trouble taking care of myself; I’d be hard-pressed to raise any offspring in a way that would make them upstanding members of society.

The flip side is that Father’s Day usually comes and goes without fanfare. My own father has been gone for half my life, and I have scant memories of Father’s Days past, although just thinking about it makes me smell a faint whiff of Old Spice, which one of my sisters would present every June.

The only Father’s Day gift I remember is a small wooden cube I made in Cub Scouts one year. It was painted white, and when the paint dried, it was then painted over with a brown stain. We were given a stylus with which we were to write a message on the block, scraping away the stain to create white letters. On one face of the block, we glued one of our wallet-sized school photos.

My message read, “Chip off the old block.” Except my mastery of the stylus was lacking, and the message turned out to read, “Chi poff the old block,” giving my older sister years of ammunition with which to tease me.

I have the old chi poff block somewhere; my father kept it on his dresser, where my mother kept it for years after his death. When she died, I took it home and put it away. Having no chi poff my own block to hand it down to, the cube may well turn up in an estate sale one day after my demise. It’s sure to sell fast and bring top dollar.

No offense to the memory of my father, but my most vivid recollections of Father’s Day are spent in Birmingham’s Linn Park and its environs, once the site of City Stages, a music extravaganza that unfolded on Father’s Day weekend for several summers in the late 1980s.

There I saw the father of clever songwriting, John Prine, and the father of Lily Hiatt, John Hiatt, who put in extraordinary sets on a stage later graced by Birmingham native and father of DIY jazz, Sun Ra.

We listened to Richie Havens, who must be the father of something or someone, and caught the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, as he gave a shout and some impromptu footwork before getting in his limo outside the Hilton Hotel.

Buddy Guy, a grandpa of blues, Jerry Jeff Walker, a cool daddio, and many more who I’ve failed to remember all performed at City Stages on Father’s Day weekends. And as we shuffled through oppressive heat, sweating so profusely that our metal City Stages buttons left rust stains on our t-shirts, I would notice a good number of obvious dads enjoying the music with their own kids. My own father lived hundreds of miles away and his health was such that a weekend in the heat and humidity would be out of the question. Besides, his taste in music ran more to the branch of country music that brought us George Jones, Conway Twitty, and Hank Williams Sr. I cannot imagine what he might have had to say about Sun Ra and his orchestra.

On this Father’s Day, I tip my hat to all the dads out there who’ve pulled cars out of the ditch, slipped their kid a twenty when Mom wasn’t looking, or pretended not to know what time it is when one of the incorrigible kids missed curfew yet again.

For all those folks whose fathers are still around, here’s a tip: Spend some time with them. They won’t be around forever.