Something to be thankful for

I spent a few hours over the weekend teaching The Boy an important skill, something that is so vital to his childhood development that failure in this area will render him a laughingstock throughout grade school.

I taught him how to catch a football.

I showed him the correct way to catch the ball -- not using his chest, as he had done, but using both hands. For good measure I had him run top speed to the end of the basement, evading a giant tackler (me) so he could score a touchdown. He has some work to do when it comes to spiking the ball after he scores, but he did a pretty good job catching.

Afterward, I reminded myself that my own father never taught me how to catch a football. Or a baseball. Or a Frisbee.

He left our family before my long-term memory kicked in. Mom returned from a train trip to visit his family, four children in tow, to an empty home. The truth his, Dad would hardly have been the model parent had he stayed, but his sudden departure would leave us struggling for years.

Dad wasn't completely out of our lives. He returned on random, infrequent visits that were short enough so he could give us a gift and make some glorious promises he would never keep. One such promise was of a trip to the Wisconsin Dells. The day of the trip I waited on our porch, closely examining every car that turned down our street to see if it was his.

None of them were. Mom finally convinced her disappointed son to leave the porch, six hours later.

As I got older, the promises got bigger -- he vowed to give me a car once, when I was 16. Yet I also quit listening to them, and to him. So I wasn't keen on seeing him when I was 21, and mom called my college dorm to tell me that Dad had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and had been given little chance to survive.

It's sad, for me and for my father, that it took a terminal illness for him to realize the mistakes he made in life, especially when it came to his children. It's also sad that it took me two years to accept his apology, and much longer than that to forgive him.

Next month will be the 14th anniversary of his death, and even now I sometimes wonder what might have been had he realized much sooner how incredible a gift parenthood is, and I miss what might have been. He had been a hard worker. I could have learned from his example. He was gifted musically, skilled at both the fiddle and the classical sax. I could have sung with him.

He also loved football. He could have taught me how to catch.

So if you ask me what I'm thankful for this holiday, it's that God has given me the opportunity to right the wrongs of my father. I will hardly be the perfect parent -- I'm a bit temperamental, I drink too much pop and I'm not the strongest guy on the planet. But my son will never go through life with a giant, Dad-sized void. I will always be there to fill it.

(Apologies for the serious post today ... As it happens I'll be traveling to rural Canada for the Thanksgiving holiday and will be totally off the grid, as the in-laws don't have the Internet up there. Seriously. They just heard of this newfangled thing called the television set up there. But I'll be back on Sunday night with a full report. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving, even to those of you Canadians who celebrated this holiday weeks ago, when it was actually harvest time.)