D IS FOR DAD
By Noel Preston 

   One Sunday morning when I was twelve years old and the rest of the family was still in bed, my father ran through the house yelling, "Get up and pee, the world's on fire!" My mother was horrified and told him never, ever to do that again, and he didn't. But I still remember that morning in spite of her highest hopes my sister and I would forget it.
   What is it that we remember the most about our fathers, and as fathers, what is it we want our children to remember the most about us? I remember my mother writing my father's name and office telephone number under the letter D for Dad in her kitchen address book. She said if there was ever an emergency and I needed help to call him right away. I don't know what he could or would have done if anything had happened, and I may have even called him once or twice, but I don't remember doing it. I do know I was never afraid of being home alone. Years later, I was using our kitchen address book to mail Christmas cards, and there, under the letter D for Dad, was my name and office telephone number! What a shock it was to see my name there instead of his - to me, "Dad" had always meant my father, but now it was my name in that address book.
   When they were young, the girls called me at the office now and then. A neighbor's dog had broken through the fence and killed one of Caroline's rabbits. Someone had left a book at school and wanted me to pick it up on the way home. Laura called once to say Caroline had stood up under an open cabinet door and cut her head. Noelle called to say she had lost a tooth and to be sure to tell the tooth fairy. They all called at different times.
   When Erin, the youngest, was five years old, her "job" was to push the upstairs button for the garage door opener when I drove up to the basement garage and honked the horn. One day she pushed the button twice and the door came down on the top of the car and scraped off the entire vinyl roof. I came roaring up the stairs and, to my eternal sorrow, slapped Erin on the side of her head. She had a black and blue swelling on the side of her face for days - and I, a pediatrician who knows about Battered Child Syndrome, had caused it.
   Recently, Erin was talking about the unexpected things kids do and she asked me if I remembered her closing the garage door on the top of my car. She had remembered, and I felt ashamed. If she remembered that, she remembered my hitting her, and I told her I was deeply, truly sorry for what I had done. A father in his fury is hard to forget, and to this day it hurts me to remember it.
   When Laura was five years old, she was riding on the back of another child's bicycle. Her foot caught in the rear wheel and the spokes tore the skin off her foot like peeling the skin off a boiled tomato. Some neighbor children ran up to our house to tell what had happened. I ran down the street to where Laura lay screaming on the pavement and picked her up and ran with her all the way back up the hill to our house. She healed, thank God, and there is no scar or disability - and if she doesn't remember that, I'm thankful.
   When I was 13, my mother lost a diamond bracelet her father had given her. My father used the insurance money to buy retractable steel storm shutters for our house, and my mother was disappointed and angry. I thought my father was wrong, but I never said so. Now I know it was hurricane season in south Florida and my father felt he needed to protect our home. Later on he did buy her a diamond bracelet, but the damage was done. He had disappointed my mother and lowered himself in my unrealistic adolescent eyes.
   A few years ago one of the men's magazines ran a Father's Day article that asked different men what single piece of advice they remembered hearing from their fathers. I've asked the same question of both men and women and the answers all seem to be simplistic and absolute, all-or-none, always or never: "Don't take 'No' for an answer," "Look both ways crossing a one-way street," "Never pass up a chance to use the bathroom -" that sort of thing. I don't remember my father saying anything other than nothing's more important than a good education. He was always more interested in the practical than the aesthetic, and one Christmas he gave me a set of new tires when I really wanted a new stereo.
   I hope my daughters remember rafting down the Chattahoochee and looking for blackberries afterwards. I hope they remember driving up the road to Fort Mountain State Park on a night so foggy we had to open the car doors and lean out to see the reflectors shining back in the center of the highway. And I hope they remember Santa Claus leaving talcum powder footprints around the tree on Christmas morning. But what they remember is out of my hands.
   My daughters all have families of their own now, and their husbands are going to do what they think fathers do, whatever that is. Since nobody knows what that is, these young men will discover every day the pain, the glory, and the joy of fatherhood: the perfect practice of it eludes us all.

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E. Noel Preston, M.D. is a pediatrician in solo practice in Peachtree Corners. 6063 Peachtree Parkway, Suite 202-A, Norcross. (770) 448-1553.

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