On Dads...

This morning thinking about my dad. Do good. Work hard. Have fun. Be kind.

My Dad is getting older and I’m confronted with the fact that someday I’m going to be living on earth without him and without the ability to call him up and hear his voice and hear his stories and get his advice. It’s just the nature of life on earth, a fact I no sooner want to accept than want to think about, but currently I can call him anytime I want and that is the gold I hold on to. He’s 86 and a half. I think we make an arch in life with regards to how we think about age. When babies are born the weeks and months matter and when we talk about age, we refer to the smaller scale. She’s 6 months old. He’s a year and a half. He’s 2 and a half. But then when kids hit their stride we revert just to the years. But then as we age and slowly become old, the half years matter again. The calendar is winding down for all of us.

We are born into a wild lottery system in life. No two lives ever the same. No two childhoods, no two relationships, nothing in your life is exactly like anyone else’s. When I think back to my childhood, who I was born to, who I had relationships with, and how those relationships worked out, I’m fucking amazed at how lucky I am.

My Dad was born in Kentucky to a coal mining family. His granddad worked in coal mines and died from black lung. His father while uneducated got a job at a furniture store and worked a long, hard life but made things one step better for his son, who not only went on to become the first family member to finish high school, but also went on to college, and then medical school. He joined the Army reserves but was never deployed.

By the time I was born he’d build a solid life in central Indiana, a life I benefited from immensely. But as I think about my dad and all that he provided, it goes far beyond any of the physical things. Physical things are just that… nothing that special compared to the intangibles we encounter in life.

We lived in the country on a fair amount of acreage. And my dad, never forgetting the family he’d come from, always wondering if he was just a few steps from financial disaster, worked his ass off. He never took what he had for granted and perhaps to a fault, didn’t slow down to enjoy the fruits of his labor until he was almost too old to enjoy them. When I was young I wondered why he didn’t slow down. I wondered why he didn’t just stop working and just enjoy what he’d built. Only now as I’m older and have the perspective of just how different his upbringing was than my own do I realize why he kept pushing, kept going. Not only did he want to ensure his own future and that of his kids was without the risks of his own childhood, but he’d learned something valuable that it took me years to learn… He enjoyed his work. He enjoyed his contribution to society.

This is one of the intangible assets he’s instilled in me. Life isn’t about what you get. Life is more valuable when you see a bigger picture of the organism that is Life On Earth, that requires inputs from all its members. Life is about doing, about giving, and there is true wisdom in the words, it is better to give than receive. It not only makes society better, but it makes us better in the sense of finding fulfillment as individuals. It’s not something that can be forced though. You have to learn this one for yourself.

Every Saturday during the school year, and every weekday during the summer I’d wake up to a note from my dad on the chopping block in the kitchen. It was short, scribbled with his fine point Cross pen that was a staple in his work shirt pocket, usually blue ink. Good morning, it always began. Then scribbled were a list of things to accomplish that day. Fence paint. Mow strip. Scrape barn. Move mulch. Cut brush. We lived on 20 acres. There was always something to do.

I can’t say I loved every chore at the time, but I also never really minded. Twenty acres provided a vast play ground of options for a kid whose siblings were all older and who didn’t have any close friends near bye. I had dogs and whatever other animals were around, we cycled through different iterations of farm animals from rabbits, to goats to horses, but always dogs to keep me company. Dogs, a tractor, and a mix of land that had a field, woods, and a creek. In hind site I’d won the lottery.

Work was never optional growing up. I’d see friends in similar families who hired out every component of their life. But in my family, the work was the point of having land. It was the thing worth doing. After I left Indiana I still gravitated towards hard jobs outside. Building cabins, landscaping, planting trees, building trails and working fires… And eventually I realized my dad (and mom) instilled in me something they hadn’t even necessarily intended… Working outside, doing hard things is just another aspect of the value of contributing in life. We not only get to contribute, but we gain strength and character for ourselves in doing so. As we give, we gain something intangible, and those inner lessons of perseverance and problem solving contribute to a deeper satisfaction in life. When I’m not pushing and working on a thing for too long, I crave it. Even in the sense of my own writing, I love the push of trying to write. And long form books require a next level of push. I absolutely attribute this inner desire to makes these pushes the result of having been habituated into hard work as a kid on a farm. That list I woke up too every day was an unlikely tutor for better living through my entire life.

The downside of my dad’s work was that he was gone a lot. His job required a high level time committed to specific locations. There was no remote work for my dad back then. If his beeper went off during dinner, he had to go. There were a lot of nights he’d show up at a soccer game only to have to leave midway through, not at all because he wanted to, but because he had to. We never questioned his commitment to us though, it was an understood thing, this is what commitment and hard work looks like. And there is value in that level of sacrifice that I think is being lost as a generation spoiled by social media neglects the value of contribution. Society is made better by people that contribute. Society is made worse by people that simply take. We think we deserve it all in this world when in fact the world owes each and every one of us nothing. We randomly appear here. We randomly die here. What we do along the way is ours to determine, and ours to either appreciate or not.

I posted a picture today on Instagram of my dad with a brief thought of what I’d learned from him, distilled into it’s simplest form: Do good, work hard, have fun, be kind. I think this sums up my dad to a tee. Character has always mattered to him. If you say you are going to do a thing, you do it. You don’t lie. You don’t steal. You don’t cheat. Ethics matter. Character matters. And even flawed as any human is, he has lived his entire life to that standard. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been lied to, cheated, stolen from, treated poorly. What others do to you isn’t an excuse for bad behavior. We used to read entire books dedicated to character. He wasn’t faking it. He wasn’t pretending. He took character seriously. A handshake meant something. You look in peoples eyes, not just to see what is in theirs, but so they can see in yours.

Work isn’t a thing to be disdained. It’s a form of contribution. It betters not only yourself but society. The harder you work, the better the world gets. It doesn’t mean you just work hard, but work smart. Use the brain god gave you, he says. Have fun. My dad was never afraid of fun, even if he didn’t have as much time as he may have liked for it. When he got home from a 12 hour day at the end of a 6 day week, no doubt exhausted, he didn’t hesitate to pull us out of our room to go shoot basketball or do something fun outside. In hindsight I’m not sure where he got all that energy. That said, his nickname for decades has been Border Collie Bill, because he did and still does possess a sort of next-level energy, and this served him incredibly well in raising four boys. He was always up for fun, even if he was exhausted.

And lastly, be kind. My parents are some of the kindest folks you’d ever meet. Kindness is built into their approach. It’s a matter of respect for others. You rise above the way the rest of the world acts, and you do the best you can. To those who much is given much is expected, sort of thing, though I’d argue nothing was ever given to my dad… he earned it all. But to him kindness matters. Always does.

As I said, I feel lucky to have been born into such an incredible family. I feel lucky to have never once questioned the love of my family. As my dad gets older and I watch him slowly quiet with age, I only hope I can carry on such a similar legacy and help pass these valuable tools on to the next generation. I’ve got two kids of my own. I have no idea if I’m doing even a fraction as well as passing on this sort of thing to them. I’m certainly doing my damnedest but it’s hard to see through the fog of the moment. But I try to keep these simple treatises in mind. Do good. Work hard. Have fun. Be kind. Happy father’s day to all you dads out there!