Colorado has come and gone and there was a lot of talk about my "second family" and the acceptance I feel around them. Father's Day also came and went while I was out there, so I think now it's only fitting to mention my first family, whose activities may not have involved hiking trips, but whose love and acceptance of me has undoubtedly kept my head above water time and time again.
First of all, I must mention that Father's Day in our family is way down on the totem pole compared to Mother's Day. Every year, my mom's birthday either falls on Mother's Day or some day surrounding it. The combination makes it nearly impossible to avoid driving that traffic-filled hour and a half home to suburbia just in time for a nice dinner and of course, that Sunday morning church service where all the mothers parade around their long lost children (who probably have given up going to church mind you) to each other after the preacher tells some sermon about obscure women in the Bible who may or may not have been mothers at some point in their lives yet showed what it meant to love. Oh, how I love Mother's Days!
Father's Day doesn't quite compare. There's not a whole lot of high expectations placed on it. When I was younger, my sister or mother would usually find some piece of clothing or gadget at Macy's that would suffice as the present from the whole family, and then my dad would be forced to run to the store to pick up whatever meat was supposed to be put on the grill for lunch, all the while missing out on the one thing he wanted to do, which of course was to watch golf...and go in and out of sleep while doing so.
As we've grown older, Father's Day has improved only marginally. My brother and I still have years where we fall back into the habit of expecting our sister to do everything for us; the gift, card, eating plans. She's good like that. Sometimes we actually willingly go to church just to say I told you so when the preacher uses that all too familiar line about how "we should be the kind of fathers our Heavenly Father is to us," or even "on this Father's Day, we should really be honoring our Heavenly Father."
I'm still convinced that there's a self-help book preachers use to turn our American holidays into Christian messages with tightly packed allusions and 'can't miss' metaphors. Sorry I digress...
For the most part, my family has never put a whole lot of emphasis on special days or bombarding each other with gifts (with the obvious exception of the millions of toys we got in our cuter years that are now gathering dust in the basement), and even when we did, I always got the feeling that we just did it for the sake of doing it.
This year, I picked up my dad a couple of shirts from his Alma Mater on the drive back from Texas. There was nothing spectacular about the shirts and a year from now I'll probably forget all about them, but I must say how different it felt to actually give my dad a real gift on Father's Day. Maybe next year, I'll give him a wrapped gift.
Now to a lot of people, these Father's and Mother's Days are a big deal and my years of half-hearted gift giving would be scoffed at, but in my family we just don't care. Gifts are just extra. It's amazing really. Whether I'm driving through middle of nowhere towns on the highway or stuck in suburban traffic, I'll sit and think of all the hurting families out there, the broken hearts and broken homes that don't make it, and then I wonder why I get to be one of the lucky ones.
