On Father’s Day

At the dining room table, my dad and my father-in-law are having some kind of discussion about Haiti. My father in law was recently hospitalized and shared a room with a Haitian gentleman. And suddenly my father and my father in law are discussing the history of Haiti and that country’s myriad problems, and the post earthquake reconstruction or the lack of it. I can’t wait for the discussion about Greece. Because it will surely come.

My mother and mother in law are sitting on the couch not fifteen feet away from me discussing wife abuse.

I can not make this up.

My son is at the park playing soccer with friends. Not the park across the street. A park about ten blocks away. My wife has really done a bang up job today. She let me sleep in and she was truly the hostess with the mostest today. I love her beyond belief. She bought me socks. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love socks. She bought me some fancy ass kick ass socks. This is how much she loves me.

My dad has started talking about Pythagoras. No really. He is.

Earlier, bagels and lox and cream cheese and pickles and Vidalia onions and cukes and capers and cakes and tarts. Fruit. Lots of fruit. I had a Pimm’s with lemonade. Perhaps I had two.  My brother came by with his wife and their brood. They have two daughters. Cutest things in the world.

Father’s Day 2011.

Later, my kid will come home and we’re going to cook. This is what we do on Father’s Day. Last year, we made Korean pancakes. Very greasy but unimaginably awesome. This year, we’re going to make a flattened garlic grilled chicken, roast some rosemary potatoes and make some green beans.

I’m not much on the Father’s Day thing, never have been, but I do feel that in this time, when pop culture isn’t necessarily friendly to fathers (at least on television – I mean, I love Homer, I really do, but he can be such a bonehead sometimes – but that’s only because guys can be boneheads, I suppose), perhaps celebrating good fathers, the importance of Fatherhood, of being a Dad, is a good thing.

Happy Father’s Day, then.

I mean it.