Among my childhood memories, there's the distant image of making Father's Day gifts in shop class.
You had a grumpy teacher with eight fingers, who was hoping to make it to retirement with six, helping you shape some glass into an ashtray.
"Uh, Mr. Skaar? My dad doesn't smoke."
"OK, weirdo from the strange family that probably reads U.S. News and World Report instead of Time or Newsweek and drinks RC Cola instead of Pepsi like God and Nixon intended, you can make your dad a braided leather necklace so he can wear his Red Star."
I kid, somewhat. I didn't make dad an ashtray. I made him a screwdriver. Too bad the ice was melted by the time he opened the present. Rather soggy, too. No, of course not. I didn't make him a drink; I made an actual screwdriver. I'll never forget that gift, because it was such a failure. Insufficiently tempered. Twisted like a warm strand of licorice the first time he used it.
When I think back, I wish I'd done more. You should wish you'd done more. But there are limits. A kind reader, knowing my affinity for old things, sent me a copy of the "Father's Day Book," published in 1937. It is compendium of speeches, poems and plays the children should perform while Father sits in his chair, dressed in a suit and tie, puffing on a pipe and wearing a frozen smile that starts to ache after the second hour.
The first play, which requires four children and a pianist, tells the story of the Prodigal Son. It is not clear about Mother's role in the play, but presumably she's in the kitchen butchering a calf. The second is called "Fathers of the Bible," and it tells you something about average family size when it calls for "a crowd." Perhaps the dog was dressed up in a robe.
"Suggested Program for Father's Day," one page says. "1. Song — 'O Worship the King!' " Dad must have thought, "I like where this is going!" Until they got to the God verses.
Reading and Recitations is a list of poems and paragraphs. One reading condemns the temptations of the saloon, where there is "brawling, senseless strife" and "the drunkard's grave," which might have made Dad's smile tighten: "I just stopped off once, Helen, you don't have to bring the children into it."
This is the second Father's Day since my father ascended upward with crisp dispatch, and looking at this 1937 pamphlet makes me wonder what he would have thought about the book. He would've been 11 in '37, perhaps rented out for the summer as a hired hand on a farm. His father was not a dedicated provider. The vision of a father in a suit and tie receiving the poetical embellishments of his children would have been as remote as an account of an Aztec coronation.
When it was his turn to be a dad, he was everything his own father wasn't. We often think our fathers arose spontaneously, like a cloud of gas that ignites into a star, but they had fathers, too. All good dads are good dads. But the good dads who stood up and said "I'll do better," those are astonishing men.
I think the last drink my father and I had together was a gin and tonic on a summer night, a few months before he passed. I would have said, "Can I make you a screwdriver?" But, well, you know.
james.lileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 • Twitter: @Lileks • facebook.com/james.lileks
