The best things my father ever said

(RNS) — If Father’s Day were a Jewish holiday, this would be its second day.

Perhaps Father’s Day should have a second day. For that matter, let’s make it an eight-day festival, like Passover and Sukkot.

My father died five years ago, at the age of 98, making this my fifth Father’s Day as an orphan. Last evening, I participated in the shiva for the father of old friends, whose friendship goes back more than a half-century. My friend’s parents embraced my father and stepmother when they wound up in the same assisted living facility in Palm Beach County, in Florida. When I got to the facility yesterday for the shiva and stepped into the living room, it brought me back to exactly five years ago, where, in that very space, I said a final farewell to my father.

There is a rabbinic adage: “The dead do not need monuments. Their words are their monuments.”

So, I replayed some tapes (more like spiritual MP3s) in my mind, and let them resonate in my soul:

I am 10 years old. I am on the Little League team, but it’s not going well, as I could not catch the ball. (Decades later, I would discover that a muscle problem in one eye interfered with some aspects of my depth perception.)

Because I cannot catch, the coach cut me from the team. My father comes to take me home, but on the way he makes a huge detour to the Mid Island Mall in Hicksville, New York. We walk into a bookstore, and he says,”Pick out a book.”

My father knew that I was not going to be a great baseball player. But he knew that I was already an avid reader, and might someday become an avid writer as well.

Even then, my father knew me, and got me.

The second story: I am 16 years old and learning to drive. Driver’s education would provide us with the skills to drive on regular roads, to parallel park. But, as for driving on the highway, our parents would need to teach us.

My father took me out to drive on the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway with me behind the wheel. The speed limit was 65 mph, and I could not wait to get there. My father and I were silent.

Suddenly, he broke the silence.

“Jeff, let up on the gas a little bit. Let the car shift into high.”

There was a note of sadness in his voice.

It wasn’t only that my father was asking me to have some compassion on the car’s automatic transmission. He was saying something else, even if he did not know it.

“I remember when I taught you how to ride a bike. And now, you’re driving a car. And soon, you’ll be going off to college. And then, you’ll be gone. Don’t grow up so fast. Don’t let me age so fast. Ease up on the gas. Slow down.”

He was right. We don’t want our kids to grow up so fast.

Last story. I am in my mid-60s, and my father is in his mid-90s. He is blind, which always struck me as a particularly cruel trick to play on a professional photographer.

A bunch of us are having dinner in Boca Raton, Florida. It was probably 5 in the afternoon. My father suddenly says, to no one in particular: “I need to go to the bathroom.”

I say to him: “Sure, fine. Let me take you.”

He retorts: “You don’t have to take me to the bathroom!”

I respond: “Dad, how many times did you take me to the bathroom when I was a toddler? You think I don’t know how to do that?”

He thinks for a moment. “You’re right. You owe me.”

Which makes me remember.

When my own son was a toddler, I was changing his diaper. He said to me, in his halting way: “Now, I change you.”

I said to him: “Someday, you might.”

This is all that I know. We live in a great braid of generations, each one telling its story, each one teaching a lesson.

Happy second-day Father’s Day.