Happy Father's Day

I picked up the phone twice to call my uncles to wish them a Happy Father's Day but couldn't. I hung up before they picked up because I knew I couldn't get through saying "Happy Father's Day" without crying.

It's odd, how often it's hit me lately, missing my father. At lunch with my cousins the other day and seeing Bobby with his sons, I remembered laughing with my dad. Or reading Zaitun and how the father bought a small, tin canoe and remembering that in the shed in my backyard growing up was a small tin canoe. I kept wondering what my dad thought when he was buying it. He would have been about my age when he did it.

I think I'd wonder some of the same things were he alive, but I could ask him. I'm beginning now to realize how little I know about my father. I don't know what he thought, what he did, who he was really. I have tokens and memories, but no insight. I try to imagine what he was thinking or how he became the person I knew...but I'll never know.

And so I wish those who have children a Happy Father's Day and remind those of you who still have fathers to get to know them. They won't always be there, and when they're gone, all the blanks will remain forever.