Father for a Lifetime

These thoughts have been on my mind for awhile, and I finally wrote them up while sitting at the fire station last week. I had thoughts of getting parts of it published in a newspaper or two, but the local paper "needs 2 weeks" to consider a "seasonal" column, so it won't appear locally. Nadine Kam said she may print some part of it in this Sunday's Star-Bulletin. In the meantime, here's a rambling blog version.

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As Fathers’ Day approaches, I think a lot about what it means to be a father.

I didn’t know my own father very well. He was around the house more than the average father because of his business, but he wasn’t a very good communicator. Most of what I remember him saying to me had to do with discipline. Harsh words coming from a stern face. Discipline certainly is an expression of love, but probably shouldn’t be the only one. Even after I left home for college and the military and I’d call home, he had little to say. His end of the phone conversation was always, “Hello. Good to hear from you. Here’s your mother.” He was a good man, a pillar of the community. At his funeral the large church literally overflowed with people. A big part of my sadness that day was that most of the people in my home town knew him better than I did.

But that doesn’t dominate my thoughts at this time of year. Life has blessed me with two wonderful daughters and for me fatherhood is the most joyful part of life. My father missed a lot of that joy by not giving it a higher priority. From walking back and forth in the hospital waiting room all the way to walking her down the aisle (or beach path, as the case may be) to “give her away,” fatherhood is filled with one joyous moment after another. Not that raising children is painless. Watching the toddler fall and scrape her knee—watching the teenager make a really bad decision—hurts the father much worse than the child. But the bad times are soon forgotten and are overshadowed by the great times.

As fathers we try to teach our babies how to be kids, and our kids how to be adults. We find tremendous enjoyment in who they are while at the same time pushing, prodding, and sometimes dragging them along through their various phases of development. We make many mistakes along the way, but our influence is nonetheless very strong. Often we think our children are deaf, as we say the same things over and over with no apparent effect. They really aren’t deaf, though. It just takes a few years for our words to finally sink in.

And this is what brings me to what I’m actually thinking a lot about this year. A few weeks ago one of my former students came from Taiwan to visit. When we were in the middle of our teacher-student relationship a few years ago he taught me a Chinese proverb, which roughly translated means this: A teacher for a day is a father for a lifetime. I thought about that a lot at the time, and even more so recently. I taught him to fly airplanes and sent him out on his first solo flight. He is now a co-pilot flying 747s across the Pacific.

A teacher’s influence is not always so measurable, but is often more important. All of us can name teachers we knew long ago who had a very strong influence on us. On our career choice, on our character, on just about every aspect of our lives. We remember our best teachers, and also our worst. We remember them because they gave us something important to our lives. Sometimes we remember to say thank you, sometimes we don’t.

Many fathers become fathers by accident and against their will. The biological aspects of fatherhood require little effort and it is sometimes just an unwanted byproduct of our baser instincts. On the other hand, teachers become “fathers” by choice and by hard work. They study many years to achieve the right and responsibility to influence young minds.

Nature has given me two daughters who are more important to me than life itself. My career choice has given me hundreds and hundreds of “children” over a lifetime of teaching, some of whom still send an occasional card or letter.

Most of my own teachers have passed to their eternal reward, which is doubtless high. However, I still want to say, “Thank you.”

Thank you to Sister Arsenia, my third and fourth grade teacher, who pointed my life in the right direction at a very crucial time. Thank you to “Prof,” my first employer when I was 14, who not only taught me photography skills but also gave me my work ethic and was the first to respect me as an adult. He also taught me social skills needed to get along in the adult world, something my own father never took the time to do. Thank you to Earl Stevic, my last graduate school profesor, who in one course gave me more of what I have found useful as a classroom teacher than the entire graduate program at the university. And one more thank you, to a more recent teacher still alive and well in Honolulu, Dr. Bob Bonham, who not only taught me skills, but also gave me a love and respect for flying that I still nurture and try to pass on to my own students. Bob now has many “grandchildren,” flying passengers comfortably around the islands of Hawaii as well flying jumbo jets out of Asia. His influence now reaches around the world on a daily basis.

So this Fathers’ Day, by all means hug your father, but also get on the phone. Call up a teacher or two and say, “Thank you.”