Father’s Day was a couple of weekends ago, and it’s a big deal because a sizeable number of my friends celebrated it for the first time. Usually, I would have put up a message on social media that would have honored all the fathers, baby daddies, stepfathers and sperm donors that are 50% responsible for the population of Earth. However, I did not.

Instead, I thought of this guy.

My father died five years ago, in August. Five years, already. That happened so fast.

My father and I had a strange relationship. I’m the last child he had with my mother, and by the time I was three, my parents decided they were better off without one another. He and I got along differently than he did with my other six siblings. They had memories of him, both fond and harsh, that I never did. He was in my life when I was young, weekend visits being the thing, but became progressively less involved when I was a teenager, and by the time I hit my late 20’s, we saw each other and spoke sporadically. When we did talk, it was brief and about the Yankees. I never hated the man, and our relationship was never adversarial; awkward is probably the best descriptor for it.

My older brother moved back to New York with his wife while she went through medical school. They decided that if they were going to live so close to our father—a 20-minute drive, maybe, in cooperative traffic—then they should be closer to him. They built a relationship with him and his teenaged son from a subsequent marriage. The following January, I resolved to do the same, and we got off to a great start. We decided we would speak once a week at least, with me calling him on Wednesday mornings on my way home from work. The next month, he had appendicitis, and the doctors found a mass in his lung. He was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, and, well…

My father was proud of us and loved his children and grandchildren. From what I saw, he adored being “Grandpa Pops” to the next generation. I hear stories about him periodically from my mother, my older siblings, and my oldest niece. We talk about

all the laughter, how funny he was, and how things he said have found their way into our normal speech (My personal favorite is his rant to distracted pedestrians: “You ever see a car in the hospital?”). Sometimes we talk about how my younger brother, Akeem, that teenaged son who has since grown up a bit, looks disturbingly like our father.

This all popped into my head because of my five brothers, three of them are fathers and good ones of that. And I know he would be proud of them. So, I would like to wish the men in my family to whom it applies a very happy (and belated) Father’s Day.

Cheers.

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