June 17, 2012


Father’s Day 2012

As fate would have it, on the day before Father’s Day 2012, I found myself at a picnic at the same place where, when I was in early grade school, our church had a big picnic each year. It was an event I really loved and one of the highlights for me was watching my dad play in the men’s softball game they had. Watching him smoothly make all the plays at second base and sling in a hit or two really made me proud.

The 50’s were ‘happy days’ for us actually. Dad was doing well in his floor covering sales job and a new Ford every two years and a week or two down the shore were parts of our life. Unfortunately things changed pretty drastically when dad’s company went under in the recession of ’62. Raising a family of six when shopping from one job to the next can really hurt.

By that time, the school/church picnic was long gone. During one of those softball games there was an outfield collision so bad that the smaller of the two bangers was carted off on a stretcher. The picnic lost its charm after that and I really think that was the last one. And looking back on it that outfield crash was like a metaphor for the crash of values and structure the era brought in. Fidelity, morality, monogamy and family values were smashed out of the mainstream by our dedication to the Colossus of a stuffed appetite.

For sure there was a need for some revolutionary spirit in the era. The closed minds of the American Dream-ers could justify anything we did as long as it was in the interest of the U S of A. We had a natural baddie called communism, and their tenant of godlessness was more than enough for us to totally muffle their call for a more equitable sharing of the goods. As good and moral a man as was my dad, when it came to communism or anti-war activity, his mind was closed tight as a drum. I remember him calling Phillip Berrigan a ‘GD traitor’.

I walked a similar pro-Vietnam walk through my high school years, and a nice high draft lottery number kept me from the fray. And while I shifted considerably to the left in college, I was more a drunken apathetic than any kind of standard bearer. I’d be out of school almost 20 years before I’d tackle the addiction demon. Reconnecting with my Higher Power via the 12 steps of AA did the trick.

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They had us light a candle and write a name on a card before mass today. I wrote down my dad, his dad, and his grand dad. And at the ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ prayer we sing, inviting all the angels in heaven to join us in praise of God, I lost it big time thinking of all of them and the All of so many others who walked this earth and who at least tried to get it right.

Picnics. Dads, baseball, a kinder gentler time…may their grace keep us moving forward.