A Deep River Year - 2017

Father's Day is a yawn in the middle of the Hallmark year. Someone must have figured that dads needed equal time with mothers, but there is little zeal in most of our celebrations. When my son asks me what I want for Father's Day, he knows I will answer "world peace" and free him of the responsibility of buying me a tie or a mug to mark the day. What I truly desire is time: time to hang out with my children and grandchildren, to listen to them reminisce or dream or laugh or solve the problems of the world together.


I don't think my father had much of a chance to do those things with his father, who spent most of his waking hours in an overstuffed chair in his living room, its upholstery blistered by cigar ashes and stains from spilled beer. My father never had stories to tell of playing catch in the back yard, riding on his father's shoulders, fishing together from the levee of the river, or working on projects in a basement workshop. He does remember his mother sending him down to the tavern on the corner to collect the old man before he spent all of the weekly paycheck. So why did my own father turn out to be such a good man?


e e cummings said of his own father that "joy was his song and joy so pure/ a heart of star by him could steer." My father's gift was his joy at caring for people, holding them in his heart, making them better than they were because he loved them. He worked at it, this love. My father lingers on the edges of my remembering, with his tongue clenched in his teeth and sweat on his face. He sucked lemons and thought them sweet. He and I would pick tomatoes on hot summer days in our enormous garden so my mother could cook them up in quart jars for the winter. Standing in the sun, we would bite into tomatoes together so that the juice would soak into our shirts, and we would be son and father forever. He loved his roses, growing them so he could give them away to strangers who needed something beautiful. He forgave the roses their thorns, just as I imagine he forgave his father's.


My Father's Rose

Every June it appears,
 one blossom,
 one rose,
 my father's gift.
 Some morning
 It will be there
 when summer slips in:
 a perfect blossom,
 rising like a flame
 amid the garden's green
 pink as a perfect sunrise.
 I will look for his footprints
 in the wet grass,
 listen for the rustle of movement
 in the forsythia
 at the edge of the yard,
 his certain presence.
 It will be goodness I feel,
 his gift,
 the thing as true and fleeting
 as a blossom.
 He saw the awful, stained world,
 the one that breaks our hearts,
 but he made it give back roses.
 They are still blooming
 this sweet June,
 and today I find
 an autograph of joy
 to celebrate my
 father's day.
--Timothy Haut