June 18th. A day that shall, for me, live in both infamy and honor. This year the date is Father's Day, and the date, in 2014, was my father's death.
I've only had one father so I can't really say if father/son relationships are all pretty much the same as mine, but I hope for those of you out there that yours is or was. I can truthfully say that in the couple of times I have been asked if I have a role model, I have never hesitated: Bill Payne was it.
Dad passed up job advancements to be with the family; he attended almost every sporting event I was in, including intramural; he backed some decisions of mine I knew he would have rather seen go another way. Dad remained married to my mother for 76 years, and all that time I never heard the man swear (No connection between the two.)
I don't mean this to be your reading how great my father was. I would image many of you could say the same, or maybe your dad could make my dad look like Negan from The Walking Dead. I just want to stress the dad-as-role-model concept.
This wonderful dad I am describing never in his life told me he loved me. I never missed it. He showed me with every action, every day. My mother was equally as forthcoming with the, "I love you's," (as I have been told, am I) but I never had a doubt about how either of them felt about me, my brother or each other. They lived their lives according to their principles, and much to the chagrin of two boys, never varied. ( Dad was a high ranking police official in Chicago and to keep a clean record in those days required a man of principle and a man who would never do anything to embarrass his family or offend his God.)
On this Father's day maybe we fathers could, after opening up our present of Soap-On-A-Rope, examine our relationships with our children. With some of us, it may be a little late to do much about it, but to whatever degree we can affect it, affect it. Do we want our children to do what we do? When they have a tough decision to make, would they ask themselves WWDD (What Would Dad Do), or is all they have of you the fact that you say, "Love ya" when you hung up the phone?
This world is changing daily. Our experiences when we were our children's age is dinosaur time. We can't give specific direction on how to act in specific cases because those cases will have changed by the time dear old dad puts together a coherent sentence. Having lived with you for possibly eighteen plus years, and your children are looking for direction in the midst of turmoil, would they ask themselves how often they were told they were loved, or how often they were shown they were loved. Then they can ask and answer WWDD.
Dad died a couple of months short of 104 so his death was not unexpected. The "crowd" at his wake was very sparse. (All of his friends were on the "other side" waiting and wondering where he was.) I was one of the last to say my good-bye's and was holding myself together very well I thought. That didn't last long. I looked back to see one last person, a man in his late 80s who had worked for dad, standing alone next to the coffin presenting as sharp a salute as I had ever seen. Maybe I was not the only person to whom dad was a role model.
