Father’s Day Poems & Stories

Words of My Father

John and Giovanni 12/16/20/4.13.23

The horses lived on the ground floor
the grandfather I never met
traded them. My father saw something beyond
the Mediterranean. He lived above the horses
in the place he never told me about, he said
he didn’t grow tall because he didn’t have enough meat
that the priest always had meat on his table. That people
starved for the priest. He lived above the horses
with his three brothers and sister and his mother
who was always home. The oldest bothers
followed a dream. To America. I don’t remember
where they went, or what they did.
But their dreams diminished
and drove them back home
backl to the horses. My father
did have a twinkle sometimes
when he said only went to church
to see the girls. He was twenty-two
when he came to America
with just a valise and enough words
to ask for the bathroom and apple pie.
I loved to see the arc of black waves coming
in his passport photo I found
ruffling through the valise in our attic.
And, I was stunned to see
how he spelled his names in Sicily.
And, that there was a gun
and a bugle in the valise too.

Father’s Day Story Collection

by Tina Gonzales

My Father, the Joker

My father is a pretty funny guy.  He likes to laugh and you don’t have to laugh along with him.  He’s always been pretty independent that way.

I remember one Christmas when he was decorating the front window by gluing puffs of cotton to the pane in an effort to make it look like snow.  Some of the neighborhood kids were playing in front of our house and when they saw my father in the window, they jumped up on the little cement wall and waved at him. He put a long piece of cotton under his nose like he was wearing a snowy mustache and waved back.  The kids were delighted and, of course, I was mortally embarrassed.

Last year in late February and early March I had been ill for a while and could barely remember what day it was.  I walked up the hill to Safeway to get a few necessities and at the checkout counter I was given some of the monopoly tickets that were part of a yearly contest.  Usually, you are only given the number listed on your receipt but this clerk just gave me a handful, not wanting to take the time to count them out.  When I got home and was putting away the groceries, I counted out the tickets and there were thirteen although the store receipt listed only three.

This made me smile because it is my favorite number and then I looked at the calendar and it finally registered that it was Friday, March 13, my father’s birthday.  I laughed and said aloud: “Happy birthday, Pa, wherever and whatever you are today. You had to make sure I didn’t forget you. How very droll.”

As I walked into my bedroom, I noticed the digital clock on my bedside table.  It read 451, the address of the house I grew up in. I’m pretty sure I rolled my eyes.  Then I said: “Okay, Pa, I get it. It’s your birthday, you reminded me, message received.  All right, already!”  Then I laughed.  What a jokester!

My father died in 1981 but he still gets around.

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When My Father Died

I didn’t have to be told when my father died.  He did that in person, in his own way.  His spirit sat on my chest and squeezed the breath out of me in the middle of the night.  I immediately woke up and even though I was somewhat groggy and disoriented I was fully aware of what had just happened; message received.

My reaction was divided.  Part of me was relieved because his last days were not happy ones.  He had been relegated to a senior care home in another city against his wishes.  At home he had been getting forgetful, leaving a pot boiling on the stove and then walking off to do something else until the burning smell would catch someone’s attention.

I was saddened that he had died but relieved in the same breath because he would no longer have to live a life that was not for him.

He had been a visitor to the world and circumnavigated the globe a dizzying number of times.  He had been in the merchant marines, worked on luxury liners that sailed out of San Francisco to exotic ports, was torpedoed and rescued two or three times in the Atlantic Ocean during WWII, had seen the Korean and Vietnam conflicts up close and personal.  When governments rose and fell, wars started and famine decimated populations, he saw it all.  Sitting day after endless day in an institution where the walls were painted San Quentin green and nothing ever happened was sure to have been a certain daily death for him.

I like to think of him floating among the stars and every once in a while, he motors back down to earth and gives me a tap on the shoulder or enters one of my dreams and gives me a bit of advice.  Like the time he was sitting at the round kitchen table in the house where I grew up.  He was seated, three older men standing behind him, all of them were wearing different patterned Pendleton shirts – like maybe they were in a club or part of a gang.  I like to think he had made new friends on the other side.

My father did not look ill and in fact looked younger than he had at the time of his death.  I sat across from him and waited because even though I sensed that I was dreaming, I still thought this was something important.  I clasped my hands on the oil cloth and waited.  I never forgot what he said to me – simple words burned into my memory, but I have hung on to them for decades.  It was only one sentence but worth its weight in gold: “Everything is going to be all right.”  These days I am hanging on to that promise for dear life because I hope he was right.

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Learning English at the Movies

Movies are lifesavers in so many ways.  When my father first came to this country in 1916, he didn’t know hardly any English.  He was luckier than most new arrivals because he had money in his pocket and had some breathing room before he needed to find a job. After securing a room in a boarding house, he wandered around New York City, seeing the sights, trying to figure out how things worked, and making lots of new friends.  On one of his wanderings, he discovered what he described as one of mankind’s greatest inventions:  the automat.

After a bit, he knew that he needed to learn English as fast as possible.  He had no patience with school and rules and homework so he had to find a quicker way.  When he discovered a movie theater near his lodgings, he realized this was a solution to his problem.  He would plunk down the entry fee (a few pennies), take his ticket and sit in the second row behind the little kids.  The silent movies had the dialog at the bottom of the screen and the youngsters would read the words out in their loud voices and from that experience my father was able to learn enough vocabulary to string together a sentence and conduct business.

What a bargain: a movie, and on Saturdays sometimes two, a newsreel, a cartoon and free English lessons.  I bet his eighteen-year-old self was probably pretty proud of his problem-solving skills.

Daddy

By Lee Ellen Shoemaker

Daddy
Remember when I was born?
At home that cold November day.
I’ll soon be 87.
How old were you?
Born in 1891.
Forty-five when I arrived.
You got sick.
He’s in Heaven, they said.
I was five.
I dreamed you held my hand.
Took me with you.
Floating through the ceiling.
You hold my heart.
Never far away.

My Father

by Naomi Cooper

When I was very little, my father still acted like a boy in many ways.
He liked to drive fast, play drums, swim out
far over his head in the Atlantic Ocean.
Whenever he threw me far above his head, my mother cried out,
“Oh, not so high! Be careful with that baby!”
But I, the baby, never felt afraid, always trusting his waiting arms.
I believed he’d hung the moon, the sun, even currents of air we breathed,
and that if some mistake happened, so I did not get caught,
his sweet breath would flow into a net,
a place for falling softly.

Jeannie Greensleaves, Daddy and Me

by Adele Brockman

My first memory of a tree
was out back of our apartment,
an old Brownstone in N. Philly,
when I was barely 3.
We had a waking ritual, Daddy & me.
He would come and pick me up
into his arms
hold me close
kiss the top of my head
and say “Where’s Jeannie Greensleaves?
Let’s find Jeannie Greensleaves.
I would point my tiny finger
to the back window,
then we’d look out and see
the big tree.
Then again, everything and everyone was big to me.
So I can’t tell you the size or any feature of the tree.
The main attraction to it was the other little girl
who lived in it – a little older than me.
Her name was Jeannie.
She had long luscious hair like mine,
only it was green!
She wore a long green ragged dress with pointy hem & sleeves,
that looked so much like leaves,
no one else could see her
but daddy & me.