If you based your opinion of Father’s Day on the greeting card aisle, you’d certainly conclude it’s mainly about golf and that “pull my finger” bit. The USGA has made sure that first part is baked in as the US Open Championship concludes on Father’s Day every year, ensuring at least one weepy player thanking his dad for all the rounds they played together years ago.

Bodily function jokes must sell a lot of greeting cards. The “pull my finger” thing has been going on for a long time.

This year is my first Father’s Day with no long distance call to make in celebration. In our tribe, part of the fun of Father’s Day has been trying to predict who would win the US Open. This results in a flurry of emails and text messages (with my siblings and Dad) during the golf coverage, often culminating with the trophy being hoisted in the air by someone none of us picked.

Dad almost always had the same pick – Tiger Woods. Although Tiger did win the Open at Torrey Pines in 2008 on a wrecked knee and a broken leg, we’re pretty sure he couldn’t do so this year.

My brothers and sister will carry on the tradition without our dad this year, but I have to say that in evaluating fathers who I personally know and trying to think about who’s the model to follow, I can only arrive at one guy – my son, Brian.

Of course, he loves his kids – who are 3 ¾ and 18 months – but this is about the active duty of being a daddy. He’s great at it. It’s not just that he builds bunk beds, a highchair and climbing walls or that he’s a fine cook or because when his washer stopped working, he took it apart, found a coin stuck in its drain, then reassembled it-correctly. All of those things amaze me, to say the least.

He can sew and crochet like his grandparents. He makes tiny stuffed creatures and seat covers and all sorts of things. It’s also the other things that he is working on every single day. Ideas that challenge his assumptions about the world, that make him a more informed voter and a better husband and son. In other words, he’s fulfilling what he’s been telling his kids from day one – “get stronger and smarter every day.”

The last year has been difficult for all of us, but for my son and daughter-in-law, it’s been a year in their house with two very young kids whose energy levels were unaffected by a pandemic. It’s go-go-go every day, diapers and teething and all the rest. For much of last year, no parks and playground equipment, no museums to visit and no gatherings with friends and like-aged kids. They are champions in my mind. No contest.

The most adorable “daddy thing” about Daddy Brian, though, is that when he puts his older son to bed, he climbs in with him under the twinkle lights in the lower bunk (mommy does this too when it’s her night). It often happens that as the bedtime story rolls along, it’s daddy who falls asleep.

And the pull-my-finger thing? Yeah, he owns that particular trick.

 


jean bolducJean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97-9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.

Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc


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