It’s Father’s Day morning, and in an hour or so my cell phone will ring, when my daughter gets up (it is Sunday, you are not an early riser) and you will wish me Happy Father’s Day in a foggy voice. I know you are just cranking up, anxious to get out and around Brooklyn, be with Jay. I have not been the center of your life for a long time now, I accept it. We will wish each other well, and then get on with the business of the moment, our lives apart.  The calls always feels a bit rote, something of obligation rather than of feeling or meaning. American holidays are like that.  Still, I like getting it.

I am not into regrets or looking back, it makes my heart heavy, I do wish we lived closer to one another and were more a part of each other’s lives. I accept that we are not. Nobody made me come up to upstate New York and buy a farm. I hope you will one day understand why I did, but you also have better things to do now with your ascending life.

I always want to tell you, but rarely do, that when your eyes popped open, and you were looking straight at me – you looked at me in wonder, then screamed, sort of setting the template I guess – you gave me one of the two or three transcendent moments of my life. Nothing much can top it, I think, I hope to leave the world remembering it. You gave definition to the very idea of life.

I am proud beyond words at the bright, funny, ethical, loving and gifted human being you are turning out to be. I don’t know if I had anything to do with that or not, I hope so. Because they are men, father’s are so many things that are strange and complex, sometimes warm, sometimes not, sometimes close, sometimes remote. Father’s Day carries this ambivalence, I see this stream of messages on my newsfeed, declarations of thanks and love and gratitude from daughters and sons to their fathers, living and dead. I will not see one of those with my name on it, that isn’t you and it isn’t me. We both would wince.

I’m heading out to help Maria shear the wool and I hope to paint the porch steps before it rains again. Until the phone rings, I will be thinking of you. I have only one wish for Father’s Day, only one thought about you, about being a Father, being a man, loving you, this is my Father’s Day wish:

Be Happy.