Father's Day a lifetime later

     When I was four,  I marveled that Dad had the power to make the loose stones make noise under his feet, where I made no sound at all as we walked with my hand in his across a gravel pan behind the movie theater where he had parked the car.
      I believed then that he would always be bigger, smarter, more man than I could ever hope to be. After all, he was Dad, and I was the kid.
     He took me everywhere with him, even when others might think it was inappropriate. Before television took such status in the American home, we went to the movies twice a week, usually on a Monday night, and again on a Wednesday afternoon, because he was off work those hours. If he stopped for a beer, I sat at the bar with him and had a Coke.
     In Ohio, I could get a Dad's root beer, in a brown bottle. Shrinks and child behaviorists would have convulsions.
     I was a privileged child, because I knew I was loved. He told stories, jokes, was full of hugs and wet kisses, and sometimes embarrassed me with his displays of affection.
     After I returned from three years in Asia, we took my parents to a Japanese steak house in Towson for some special occasion, and while Mom and Pat visited the ladies' room after the drive from home, Dad and I were seated with a few strangers at the rim of the cooking area.
    Two guys, talking and laughing and obviously close.
    At one point, Dad was overcome with emotion and gave me a big hug, then, looking sheepishly at the strangers at the setting, said, "We're not queer. He's my SON!"
    Years later, Mom told me the reason Dad never got out of bed to say goodbye the morning I shipped out was because he was afraid he'd break down and cry.  I had thought it was just no big deal, but that was before I had become a father.
    He fought cancer, and announced that he was cured, and we vacationed together; Mom and Dad, my wife and sons, sharing a rental off the beach in South Bethany. The village was about a mile up the coast, and the first year, Dad and my sons and I would walk up there for breakfast.
    A year later, we got so far on such a walk to breakfast, and Dad stopped and announced that he didn't think he could make it all the way up and back. Brian and I should go ahead without him, he was going back to the house.
    It was a moment. Him, walking back, turning to wave once, Brian, out in front, impatient to get going.
    Several years later, I arrived at his house on a Sunday morning as was our custom, but this time I wanted to take him for a drive. He was by now in the final stages of bone cancer, and could no longer tool around in his car on country roads, listening to a big band station on the radio, smoking a cigar.
    He was using a walker now, coming down the wooden ramp I had fashioned to help him clear the two steps off the porch to the sidewalk. He looked up at a beautiful morning and broke into a few lines of one of his favorite songs: "Blue skies, smiling at me, nothing but blue skies, do I see."
    I was thinking, later, that was Dad. He showed me how to live, and he showed me how to die.
     He was the same age that I am now, last time I saw him..