approaching a different kind of father's day

It's that time of year again and I've been getting all sorts of email reminders to not forget the Big Day from such respected purveyors of appreciation as Crate & Barrel, Amazon, Williams Sonoma, etc. ("Let Us Help You Find The Perfect Gift For The World's Greatest Dad!!!")

But this year is feeling different somehow, and at first I couldn't quite pin down why. Last year it was still all about my father, and I was still writing about and thinking about and missing him with all my heart. I remember that I posted something on Facebook to that effect, or rather about being sick to death of all those jaunty email reminders to spend spend spend on a man I hadn't seen for sixteen years. Friend Rachel, whose mother died a year after my father, commented that Mother's Day got a little easier for her once she had children of her own but that I, being a girl and all, would never be able to experience that shift, never be able to claim Father's Day as my own.

I found this to be both disconcertingly sad and yet also strangely comforting: sad that I will never be able to lay claim to Father's Day in my own right in the way that Rachel was able to do with Mother's Day, but comforting in that the day will always be my dad's.

My family wasn't big into expensive gifts for Mother's & Father's Days, but we always had special mornings (for Mom, breakfast in bed embellished with flowers picked from the yard and then a trip to a local nursery for the season's first plantings; for Dad, donuts and sour cherry balls and thermoses of coffee and hot chocolate in the little gazebo in Garrison, NY, on a lovely bit of land jutting out into the Hudson River) and made cards by hand. Father's Day, being so close to my birthday, also usually entailed a father/daughter dinner, usually at Paul Ma's, our favorite Chinese restaurant.

I have been missing those mornings and those dinners for seventeen years now, and will probably miss them for the rest of my life.

But this year I'll be in Anacortes for Father's Day and my birthday, and Mom has been planning a barbecue for that Sunday, and we'll spend the afternoon chatting with friends and family, helping in the kitchen or at the grill, making little flower arrangements from the garden. We'll be eating Paul's oysters and munching on Paul's famous Green Stuff and I'll be so very happy to be spending Father's Day with someone who, though not my father, is a wonderful father in his own right and the best stepdad a girl could hope to have.