Dan Kempner
Editor
I stood, one late-Summer day, within a wide circle of men in a Massachusetts field. There were about 40 of us, hip-deep in tall, fragrant grass. The sun was sinking behind a tall stand of trees, from which stand coyotes howled from time to time. Crickets were beginning to buzz as well. It was a fine evening.
We were there for the penultimate meeting of what Mentor Discover Inspire (MDI) has long called a ‘point team.’ That is a team formed for this purpose: to train the men therein in the meaning and discipline of committment-keeping and integrity. Honor, if you will.
Most of the participants that day were not on the point team itself. They were guests – friends, family, colleagues – invited by team members for that meeting alone. We asked them there to stand with us Point Team members as we completed the program. It’s a rigorous and demanding training, and completion is worth having an audience for. Many of the original team had washed out or quit.
To start the meeting off, each man was asked to talk about his father: what kind of man he was and what it was like to have been, perhaps still be, his son.
Cool, I remember thinking, this should be fun! and I began combing my memory for the juiciest stories about my dad. How he enjoyed wearing a sword when he played Admiral Drake in Professor Popper’s Penguins when I was little.
Or the time he threw the ball too high only to see me slam into a tree while running under it, knocking myself out. He had carried me, bleeding from the head, all the way home, and put me in one of his workshirts as a smock for the blood. Mom was out with the car so he hefted my substantial nine-year-old frame and, somehow, carried me in his arms a half a mile down Toronto’s Finch Avenue to our doctor’s office. He cried all the way. If by chance I’d been harboring doubts that the man loved me, they turned to dust on that trip, and the stitches were a small price to pay.
I might talk about his evolution from a hot-tempered, imperious younger man to a fully mature and wise older dad. A man who had revitalized his marriage, his career, and his friendships – including with me. He had died a happy and successful man.
I was crafting this narrative when I heard the first man say, “Fuck my dad. I hate that bastard. He beat me with a belt and hit my mom when he was drunk. Fuck him.”
Whoa, I thought, weird. What a shame, and was continuing to compile my own tale when the next man said, “I never want to see the son-of-a-bitch again.”
Two in a row? Fucked up! What were the chances? But then one of my in-laws, a guest, said, “The guy had no idea how to be a father. I don’t even talk to him anymore. He’s not my dad as far as I’m concerned.”
It went on and on. More, and ever more men, called their fathers drunks, perverts, losers, criminals. Their dads had beaten them, or raped them, or had emotionally destroyed them, or had run out on them and their families.
Holy shit! I thought. There are forty men here and somewhere between half and two-thirds of them just freakin’ hate their fathers! Can this be how it really is out there? What the…??!
I don’t pretend to know the stats: I didn’t write my thesis on fatherhood or any of that. But I do know that more than half of a group of adult men, assembled at random, once placed their fathers in a range between being a derelict on one end and a demon at the other. Is that really what the world is like? Was my dad the anomaly, the outlier, and not theirs? Are terrible fathers normal?
I don’t know, but I do know that there must have been a lot of suffering going on in more than half the homes around me, suffering I never knew about. Apparently, many dads suck so badly that a bunch of their sons were eager to stand around and crucify them to a passel of strangers in a field.
Still, there is this for my comfort: the reason for being in that wide, coyote-serenaded circle was to have my nose rubbed in the Mentor Discover Inspire Code of Honor. That is a code all MDI men must agree to uphold when paying their dues.
That agreement mean we won’t engage in battles with weaker opponents, and indeed will only fight when the battle is an honorable one. By this standard, the dads of more than half the men in that field had failed, miserably.
We agree to keep our word, to honor our commitments before we satisfy our own desires. And perhaps the most devastating of all, we give our word that we’ll set an example for children – not just our own children but children, period. Those guys’ fathers, so they testified that day, fucked all of that up… royally.
A few days from now it will be Father’s Day again. For me it will be like it was with my own dad: my wife will arrange something nice and my two little girls will fuss around adorably. But every Father’s Day since that meeting, I can’t help remembering that for an awful lot of men, Father’s Day not a happy day. I wonder what they will be saying to their fathers, and what their kids will be saying about them.
The dads of the men I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with must have been as miserable on Father’s Day as their sons were. How far down the hill is all that going to roll, and for how long?
For those of us who, in Graham Nash’s words, must have a code that we can live by, there’s a terrific opportunity to stop this boulder in its tracks. What if every man, before knocking someone up, must agree to that code, what then? What if they’d had a code they lived by? Would their sons have been ripping them that day? It seems doubtful.
But there they are, standing out in some field, or in a shrink’s office, talking about how badly their father’s sucked and wondering if they are terrible fathers, too. We can’t go back and teach our parents well, as Nash suggests. But we can stop the boulder here, and offer our own sons a code.
So, Happy Father’s Day, men. At least, that’s what I’m rooting for.
My blessing, for what it’s worth, goes out to all you fathers and all you sons on Father’s Day. Mazel Tov, as my dad used to say.
While I’m at it, a blessing on my own dad’s head. I was one of the lucky ones, and I know it.
We welcome former columnist Dan Kempner as our new editor of Legacy Magazine.