Fatherhood - Happy Father's Day 2011

I took this shot a year ago in May while visiting New York with my daughter. We were staying in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood and I got up early on Saturday morning to wander the streets of Brooklyn to see what I could see and hopefully do a little street photography. 

I was wandering up Fourth Avenue, heading north I believe, when I saw this cool looking mural on the other side of the street, at the intersection of Lincoln Place, on a building housing the Diaspora Community Services. Then this great fortuitous, serendipitous thing happened. Here was this man walking toward Fourth Avenue with this baby in a chest carrier. I already had my camera ready with a telephoto lens on it and I waited for him to come out of the shadow into the light. 

The man and baby by themselves would have made a great street photography grab - with his hat, pants legs rolled up and both hands holding the baby's hands. But there they were against the backdrop of a gigantic mural portraying this muscular working man seemingly embracing the world and everything in it. This photo speaks to  me of strong fathers -- men who toil for a living and love their families.

I was blessed with a father who strong and hard working and dedicated to his family. My Dad wasn't perfect and he made mistakes, but he was (is) a damn good father - I never doubted he love and always knew he had my back when I needed it.  He just turned 87 this past week, and even now he is ready to come to the aid of his very adult children when he thinks they need him.  

My father had a hard life. He was helping on the family farm, walking behind a plow horse by the time he was 5. He had to quit school in 8th grade, as the oldest child, and take over running the farm, while his father went to work in town during the Great Depression. He and my mother had known each other only a couple of weeks before they got married and he shipped overseas to the Pacific during World War II. Sixty-seven years later, my father remains a dedicated, loving husband to my mother. 

After the war, my parents moved to Detroit, so my Dad could get a job in the auto factories. He eventually ended up at Massey-Ferguson, where -  despite only having an eighth grade education, he eventually rose up to be a plant manager. 

Growing up, I truly thought that this was a man who could do anything. When I was about 12, he took a sledge hammer to the back of our small brick ranch in Livonia, knocking out the wall to begin a summer long project of building a family room addition - pretty much doing all the work himself. He could fix cars or just about anything else. 

Back in the days of my youth and when I fashioned myself as an aspiring poet, I wrote this poem about him:

My Father Can

My father amazes me.

He can square, saw, plane, nail

a whole house together.

But he falls asleep

when he reads the paper.

And he couldn't tell you

the last book he's read.

I can tell you I just finished

a Hemingway novel

and write newspaper stories for a living.

But I could never be so smart

as to square, saw, plane, nail

a whole house together.

My father and I were different in many ways - I was a dreamer with a love of reading and the arts; he was practical and a nose to the grindstone guy. He didn't drink or smoke, but he sure could swear when he got mad (which wasn't all that infrequent). But, despite our differences, he taught me a lot, mostly the importance of being a good, hard-working, honest man. And he inspired me to try to be the best father I could be - someone who would always be there for my daughter, just like I always knew he would be there for me and my brothers and sisters.

So thank you Dad for everything you have done and achieved, and the path that you showed me to take.