father's day, down to earth

This Father's Day, I just know I'm going to get that e-mail.

You know the one I mean. It's the inspirational story about a father who found himself surrounded by nine children when his wife died. Over the next 20 years, this poor widower started up his own business to avoid leaving his children with someone else, kept his family together, and single-handedly raised them all into fine, upstanding citizens, and then quietly passed away after his last child was on her own.

It's a good story, I suppose, and for some people it captures the spirit of Father's Day in a Horatio Alger sort of way: the Super-Dad, who towers above the crowd, acting as a moral and spiritual compass to his children and making lesser fathers feel ashamed of their failings.

Well, if people want to find inspiration in that sort of father, let them. I don't do much traffic with larger-than-life icons, to be honest, which is why I'm going to spend my Father's Day thinking of the man in the white jacket and the tousle cap.

That man, of course, is my own father, all six feet of him. I think of him as wearing those clothes because those, to me, represent what being a father is all about. Those are the clothes he used to wear when we walked the dog together at night.

We talked about a lot of things during those walks. What we talked about doesn't matter as much as the fact that we did talk. In a time when "making memories" was the rage for raising children amid the hustle and bustle of high-power careers and success, my father set a standard no trip to the Grand Canyon or the Statue of Liberty ever could equal, just by spending time with his children.

Like many other men, my father had trouble relating to his children, but that never stopped him from trying. When we went on camping trips, my father always went along, even though he hated camping. And when we got involved in an activity — soccer, Scouting, even our newspaper routes — my father was always as involved as we were.

Most fathers' stories aren't as spectacular as the one in the mass-forwarded e-mail I've seen too many times, but their efforts are no less important to the children they raised. This Father's Day, I'm going to call the man with the white jacket and the tousle hat, and I'm going to tell him how much I love him.

And then I'm going to get my own son, and we're going to walk the dog.