My father died in a bicycle accident on Father’s Day in 1970. His death on that made-up, greeting-card holiday has always haunted me. It feels eerie in the same way that people dying on their birthday feels a little creepy. When I flew to New York for his funeral, I saw the unopened Father’s Day card my sister and I had sent him a few days earlier sitting on his desk.
He must have been saving it to open on the actual day. The fact that he never opened that card made me very sad then, but, in fact, I knew, even in that moment, that he knew how much I loved him, even without having read that card.
There are many things I adored about my father. In the 1950s, the era of my childhood, when many girls were instructed to be soft-spoken and ladylike, my father was teaching me about fishing and football, and he also taught me every dirty word he knew. He never articulated any philosophy about this, and I know he enjoyed being a bit of a bad boy in teaching his daughters these words; the positive outcome for me was that no boy could ever frighten or intimidate me with any word. Knowing those words was like a protective shield against one kind of harm my father knew a girl could encounter. For me “bad words” has always meant incorrectly used pronouns, not so-called “dirty” words.
One of my father’s most wonderful talents was his storytelling. He created several story lines, and told chapter books to my sisters and me in installments. Sometimes the story concepts were frivolous and fun, like the series he created about how vegetables got their names. In those tales there was always a long set-up for the story with elaborate names, ending with the punch line; for example, for the vegetable turnips, a long dog story would end “and then she said, ‘turn, Nips’ to her dog, and at that moment the previously unnamed purplish white vegetable got its name.”
Those stories were fun, but not edge-of-my-seat gripping like the Mosemary stories in which a fictional fourth daughter, Mosemary, was added to our family of three girls. It was she who did every naughty thing a person could do. Mosemary was a hell-raiser and constantly in trouble for her various and always escalating antics. No matter how bad my sisters and I ever were, we were never anywhere close to being as bad as Mosemary!
As much as I adored the Mosemary saga, there was another series I liked even better: the Hawk Family. The Hawks were a Native American family; my father called them Indians. The father’s name was Mo Hawk. The mother was Kitty Hawk. The older brother was Tommy Hawk.
And the daughter was Selma. I did not appreciate these names when the stories were first told to me. Every chapter started with a recitation of naming who was in the family, followed by the words “on this particular day,” my father’s version of once upon a time. In each chapter there was some contest or some difficult task to be overcome. Selma always begged to be included in whatever it was, only to be told she was too little and also she was a girl, therefore not eligible for whatever it was. It came as no surprise to me that Selma always ran the fastest race, caught the biggest fish, and exceeded all expectations. The fact that there was a distinctly derivative quality in every Hawk Family story did not diminish my enthusiasm for these tales.
Although he never said it, the message was very clear: Don’t let anyone’s assessment of you get in the way of what you know you can do.
Despite the fact that I have lived twice as many years without my father as with him, I still miss him. Every joyous occasion since his death has been tinged with sadness because of his absence. Sometimes I say it out loud, Daddy would have loved this party or this occasion or this moment; even unspoken, the thought hovers. He would have adored the grandchildren he never knew, and they him. Now there are great-grandchildren he won’t know. In my mind he is still 53, smart, powerful and funny. I never got to say good-bye to him. He was alive and strong one minute and then gone forever.
There are no Hallmark cards with the greeting I would send to him if he were alive. That card would be slightly outrageous, unprintable — and he would love it.
Ellen Hofheimer Bettmann lives in Etna.