Dad at 70

When my dad turned 70, there was a big, big party. I couldn't be there. I had just moved to Shanghai and started a new job. I didn't have any vacation time to fly home on. I didn't mind missing the celebration, but I was gutted to miss the opportunity to celebrate him. So, I made a video tape (remember those?) with this message. * * * Hi, Dad… I don’t know whether you’ll see this before your actual birthday, on the day, or after. Regardless, I hope you’re celebrating, and I wish I could be there throughout. So, since I can’t be, I thought this would be the next best thing. Up until a couple of months ago, I was planning on flying in for this one. Seventy is an occasion that deserves at least a hop on a plane. Sending you this tape is a distant second-best, and I will always miss having been there on the day you officially became an old guy. As a result, I thought it would be appropriate if I based all that I want to say on my feelings about why I’m here, and not there, and the role you’ve played in that. A few months ago, I gave you a book, A Mass for the Dead, as a way of letting you know how fortunate I felt not to be in the author’s shoes. He was stuck, only having realized the great gift of his father’s character after his father had died. As much as the book was a celebration of his parents’ lives, it was soaked in his remorse about not having expressed—about not having even realized—his appreciation for his parents’ stewardship of his life, nor their legacy to him: the legacy of his own character, molded, despite himself, by their life-long example, and by their love. Giving you that book, and the letter enclosed with it, was one of the best things I’d done in a long time, even if you didn’t like it much. I can’t account for your taste in books, but I can make sure you know what your son thinks and feels about you. As good as I felt about sending the book and the letter, there was still a great deal left unsaid. So, even though there’s a chance it’s the most selfish birthday gift I could send you, I want to finish the job. I know it’s not much of a gift, by some standards. I wish there were something grand, and showy and surprising that you’d really value, and that I could have had delivered to your door in the biggest truck UPS has got. But I can’t think of it. So, this is the gift you get when you’re a pain in the ass to shop for. Having made a big deal about this four dollar and 95-cent videotape being your present, I have a hard time naming what it is I want to put on it. In a way, it’s a tribute. It’s also thanks. But I hope that I get at a bunch of other stuff I can’t articulate, too. I’m a little nervous it’s going to end up sounding like a eulogy. If it does, that’s only because people save their nicest things to say about you until you’re dead. And, mostly, so far as I can tell, they mourn the loss of the opportunity to tell the dead guy how much they loved him. I won’t make that mistake. I’d rather say it now, trading on the excuse of your 70th birthday, when you look like you’ve got about another 70 years in you. The evidence of the success of those first 70 years is all around you. The material success sure, though in my life I can’t remember you emphasizing it all that much. Sandy’s boys, as your grandchildren—showing so many of your physical and temperamental characteristics already—are, in a way, a testament to you as a patriarch. Your marriage to Myrna is a monument to you as a lover and husband. Your golf handicap isn’t much of an achievement, but it’s a work in progress. One of the things I don’t really know about you is how reflective you are, in quiet moments on your own. I don’t know if you sit back and wonder whether you were a good father…or whether you assume, to quote one of the philosophies with which you raised me, that you did the best you could at the time and that’s all anyone can ever ask. To toss my two cents at that question—of the quality of your fatherhood—and to assuage my sadness at not being there in person, I thought I’d play on the irony that I reckon I’m in Shanghai right now, making this videotape, because of what an extraordinary father you are. There are things I like about myself and things I don’t, but so many of my strengths are reflections of you. Most of the teaching I remember you doing, as I was growing up, you did by example, rather than by lecture. If boys learn how to be men from the way their fathers are men, then here’s some of what I learned from you. I learned that experiences are more important than things. I learned that the night sky is worth noticing…worth lying on your back at midnight in the summertime, and drinking in with your eyes. I learned that home is where you make it with people you love. I learned that integrity and justice matter…and that even if they are rarely achieved as absolutes, they’re always worth pursuing. I learned that you should always be careful with sharp objects. I learned that the purest way to love someone is to do all you can to lift them up as they strive, so they might become more than they otherwise would. I learned that fear is okay…but never to let it keep you from an experience that would help you grow. I learned to love words, and I learned to love ideas even more, and I learned to love principles even more, still. I learned that dedication matters. And I learned that the only way the people you love are really going to know it is if you tell them and show them all the time. I’ve gotten myself in trouble living out some of those lessons. But whenever I have, I have known I was in trouble for the right reasons. More importantly, the things I consider my successes have grown out of these and other principles I watch you live. This adventure I’m on now, in Shanghai, would seem crazy to most men’s sons. To me, it seems like an extension of my father’s desire to show me new places, new things…whether it was a cross-country camping trip for which he pulled me out of school early, or a trip to Europe, or a move to a country that, at the time, seemed as foreign as China, even if it was only Canada. If your dad were alive, I think he might have a hard time believing his grandson is living in China. It’s a long way from the tobacco farm and the hand-built house in Greensboro. But I didn’t create that leap. You did. I don’t think you know that the part of my family history that I recount with greatest pride is of the hillbillies who never made it past grade school, and then of the one who did. Without knowing it, I internalized the example of your self-determination to create a life that would be all you wanted. I can only remember three fights we ever had. One of them was about me being a self-absorbed dickhead. Both of the other two were about my education. …about you caring that I keep open all the kinds of options you had created in your life. …because you knew what it was like to have to fight for them. It is because, by the light of your example, I’ve grasped every wild-ass great opportunity I’ve had, that I’m in China right now. I’m still profoundly sad I can’t make it to be with you this weekend: to this celebration of the first seventy years of your life. But I hope you’ll take as a consolation this one thought: to me, every day I wake up is a small celebration of your life, because I’m grateful for who you have been, and who you are, that has made me who I am. I’ve always wanted to give you gifts that you’d love, and that had something of me in them. So, asserting that 70th birthdays are a good time to be philosophical, I’ll posit that our lives and what we do with them are, in the end, all that we have to offer the people we love. Nothing else matters much. So, I hope you’ll accept, on your 70th birthday, my life—hopefully well-lived, but certainly gratefully lived—as my gift to you. …and not just because you’re a pain to shop for. I love you. Happy Birthday. ..