Being a father and a son, gratitude and all the feels well up on Father’s Day. About four and a half years ago, my father turned 70. We had a surprise shindig for him at the Oxford Community Center, which was the Oxford school where he went for kindergarten through 8th grade. He got roasted by a number of folks, and I spruced up my remarks and published them on Eastern Shore Savvy, a cool online magazine that has since gone away. And along with it, all the articles that were once online.
I missed having that article around in particular, so I found my draft of it, and bring it back here, for Father’s Day, four years later.
I’ll Never Be on Oprah
From Eastern Shore Savvy, January 2014
My father just turned 70 and I think I can beat him in a foot race. We used to race in front of our house in Oxford, maybe 50 yards to the end of the street. I was in high school the first time I managed to beat him.
My father grew up in Oxford when you could have horses and chickens there. He shares his name, Robert, with his father. He went to school in the building that now houses the Oxford Community Center. He met my mom, who is from Towson, Md., through a mutual friend in Ocean City when they were teenagers. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1966, the first in his family to do so. The Vietnam War was in full swing and the draft was happening. So he enlisted in the Army. The classes that completed basic training before and after him went to Vietnam. My dad was sent to Germany.
After the Army, my father returned to the Eastern Shore. A friend convinced him to think about public accounting as a career. In 1974, when I was two, he joined Beatty, Satchell and Company, a CPA firm, became a partner and has worked there ever since.
I have a lot of classic memories of growing up, father and son stuff. We’ve always had baseball—from learning to play catch in the back yard, to going to Orioles games at Memorial Stadium. To this day I’ve seen more professional sporting events at Baltimore’s now leveled ball park than anywhere else. I remember Dad playing first base on his office softball team, and when I got old enough, and good enough in little league, that’s the position I wanted to play.
During my last year of little league, my dad had taken to filming our games on his Betamax camcorder—he was convinced that Beta would surely outlast VHS—he created priceless audio while filming the last play of my season. Playing in Cordova, I slid safely into home plate on a wild pitch, stood up and raised a badly broken wrist up in the air. You hear a few gasps in the bleachers and then dad saying, “Oh sh**!” right before the tape cuts off. I haven’t watched that tape very often.
As an accountant, my father planned our family trips around CPA conventions—to Disney World, the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn., and to Boston. We drove like the Griswolds in the movie “Vacation,” as I wasn’t big on flying, and we stopped to in Charlottesville, Va., to dad’s alma mater, the Natural Bridge and the American icon, South of the Border, where Pedro straddles the line between the Carolinas.
Growing up in our house, Halloween quickly became our favorite holiday, because it meant helping build and being behind the scenes of the Kiwanis Club haunted houses, which were well known and epic to almost anyone that lived in Talbot County between the late 1970s to mid 1980s. I’ve seen my dad as Frankenstein, as a mad scientist, and a swamp creature, among other things.
There are some things a son picks up from his father. When I started drinking beer, I always went for Miller Lite. When watching the Baltimore Ravens, we yell the same words (in the same pitch) at the television when they throw an interception. I learned that real Christmas shopping is done on Christmas Eve, and not a day before.
There are some traits or inclinations that aren’t necessarily passed down. I’ve got more hair than my father does. I don’t eat as many Snyder’s Pretzels. And numbers don’t speak to me the way they do to him. With any father and son I guess there are going to be striking similarities and head-scratching differences and I think as I’ve gotten older I have learned to marvel at both.
A lot of writers get noticed for having troubled upbringings or non-existent parents, and they have become great despite what they’ve had to overcome. Dad has given me the creative disadvantage of raising my sister and me well. He taught us, by the way he lives, the difference between right and wrong. He’s been the consummate provider, working so that my mother didn’t have to, and making sure we could go to college. He has provided the example for me, of how to be a father, and set the bar immeasurably high. I’ll never be on Oprah.
When we get together for holidays or family dinners or kids’ sports games, my father has accepted the mantel of “Granddaddy,” which is what my sister and I called his father. As a father now, I think I feel maybe what he must have felt then, surrounded by your parents and your children. I’m not sure it gets any better than that.
Wonderful tribute to your Dad. All true. Happy Father’s Day