Fathers

The luck of the draw made itself known in my life when I was born to my father, Bobby MacMillan, a Scottish-American pistol from Massachusetts with sparkling blue eyes, a fun-loving heart and a fierce love for his daughter. He made friends wherever we went - at the lake, at the ski areas, at the Howard Johnson’s where we used to go a lot before I grew up and realized that orange sherbet tastes like baby aspirin.

“That was when the world wasn't so big and I could see everywhere. It was when my father was a hero and not a human.”

― Markus Zusak

He had to travel frequently for his job, and when it came time for him to start packing on Sunday evening, I got quiet and started plotting how I could prevent him from going. I hid his suitcase under the bed when I was six. I hid his car keys the next year in the pocket of my winter coat when it was summer. Better but not good enough. I should have thrown them up into the chaos of the attic. I tried to tell him why I was determined to keep him there–as the antidote to his bitter other half–but he did not want to believe he was leaving me to pain as he went to do his job. He was a husband and father, and he had a duty that he took seriously. After driving for hundreds and hundreds of miles during the few weeks he was gone, he came home and drove us to the beach or the lake or the mountains, never admitting that more driving was the last thing he felt like doing. He wanted to make his kids happy.

A quick portrait of my dad (pictured): Sometime in the early 90s on their 50th wedding anniversary, my parents and other family members gathered at my house in NH to celebrate that nowadays-almost-unheard-of milestone, and my father showed up in a white shirt, white sweater, white pants, white belt, white socks and shoes and white hat. When I commented on his attire, he looked at me and said, as droll as you please, “I want to be the bride this time.”

A few months after he died, I went on a belated honeymoon to the Caribbean with my then-husband, and the veil between my world and the one my father is now in parted widely to provide a miracle of connection, a message of love that he and I had made a pact to deliver to the other when one of us died, and absolute proof positive that there is, in fact, an afterlife. It’s the best story I will ever have to tell, and a pocket of other-worldly hope living in my heart that the ones we love most are still alive and waiting for us in a much better place than this one. Our pets are there, too. Believe it. I know this for sure.

If you didn’t have such an ideal scenario with your father, then apply this to your mother, your grandmother, a favorite teacher or your “person”, whomever that might be. Today is Father’s Day and my Dad is expecting me to gush, not that I need a holiday as a prompt.

Good men with unselfish hearts are natural mentors, and they, like all of us, need to be needed. Maybe there’s a good father out there who is looking for a son or daughter to love. If your blood father fell short of the kind of love you needed, find the love of a good father in someone who needs you as much as you need him.

If you were lucky enough to have a father like mine, spend some time with him today. Even if he’s passed, he’s around. He’s protecting you still, and rooting for you, and wanting you to know it.

I love you always, Dad, with all my heart. See you when I get there.

© 2019 Laurie MacMillan All rights reserved.