Here’s to dear old Dad, especially if dear old Dad was a hell-raiser.
My father wouldn’t have fit on a Hallmark Card. My parents’ divorce removed him from any daily contact with his children, and when he came into our lives (once a year, for years and years), he’d stomp in and try to give us course corrections. We called him Master Sgt. Campbell, behind his back. To his face, we tried to be perfect children — or I did.
He drank. He got into bar fights. He was a sniper. Back when my parents still liked each other, my mother once inked onto a photo of a group of soldiers parachuting to the ground in the distance, “Hero.” He got blown up in Vietnam, and then rallied enough to cuss out a Catholic priest who was giving him last rites.
I guess you could say he was a man’s man, and when I worked up the nerve to tell him I was divorcing 100 years ago, the first thing out of his mouth was “Honey, you’re doing the right thing.” I believe I started crying. I’d expected a heater-blast of condemnation, and I got love, the unconditional kind you read about. Just like that, our relationship changed, and — I’ve said this before — if he was an imperfect man, he was the perfect father for me.
I have a later photo of my father and my son, where my son’s grin wraps around his head twice, and the look of love on my father’s face made him look…gentle as a lamb. I stare at that photo more than is healthy. I’m posting the one of my father in uniform because I’m living proof that what you think you see in a person may be wrong, wrong, wrong.
My father died in 1992 of a particularly virulent kind of cancer. He went out with his chin up, as he reassured all of us that he’d made peace with the world, and that Scots are noble by birth.
I love and miss him still.
May you have been blessed with a hell-raiser of your own. Feel free to send me a photo (JPEG preferred) of your father, and I’ll post it here:
Say hello to Sharon’s father, who is about 54 in this photo. She says she also have a photo of him in his military uniform when he was in his 20s, but of course can’t find it now.
I miss my dad too. He was gone at 64, far too early from leukemia. I was lucky to have him. He was a good dad, always there and in my eyes could fix anything from building our house to mending my little girl woes. I spent my Saturday’s in his workshop or at the hardware store or lumber yard. Except for letting me get too close to a pot-belly stove at Ange’s Lumber and set my snow-suit on fire he took good care of me!!! P.s. I really only smoldered and burned a hole in the snow-suit no damage to my butt!
I love that story. Thank you.
My dad was a hell raiser, too. He was married 6 times. My mom said he was a great boyfriend but a lousy husband. They were divorced when I was 4 and my sister was just an infant. We all lived in Dallas, but we saw him only occasionally, usually at my aunt’s house. Popo was his sister, and the glue that held the Foster family together. He died of a heart attack about 4 years after this picture was taken. He’d been a pretty heavy smoker all his life.
P.s. He had his own business most of his life, fixing heating and air conditioning systems. I wish he’d passed on some of that entrepreneurial spirit to me, along with his mechanical skills with cars.
I bet he could have easily been my dad’s friend, with a record like that. Wahoo for hell-raisers!
This is my first Fathers Day without both my dads; my own father who passed away in January and my father-in-law who passed in November. I’m sad…….
Ah, Sis. Anne. I’m so very sorry.
The Campbell hell-raising spirit lives on in you! Thanks for this.
I will see my dad today. We don’t always see the world in the same way, but he is a great dad. And, growing up, he was a fun dad. He was like a big kid sometimes, which annoyed my mom every now and then, but thrilled my brother & me. I’m lucky to still have him in my life. My father-in-law, too. He is a kind soul.
Lost mine 52 years ago, or really lost him when my parents divorced some 8 or 9 years before that. He stayed in St. Louis and remarried, we came back to my mother’s family in CT. Saw him once or twice a year after that until he died. So Father’s Day doesn’t bring me much except the occasional twinge….
I’m sorry.
Thanks, it is — as they say — what it is. Y’know?
Yep. I don’t throw much of a Mother’s Day bash, myself. Or a Father’s Day one, either. I was just really lucky to have the father I had, I guess.
And some celebrate Father’s Day and some celebrate Mother’s Day and some celebrate neither and some celebrate both. We all have our stories. It’s who we are.