Carpe Diem: 2016.06.20 Father’s Day

I can’t remember the movie it’s from, or even whether the line was delivered with irony: “A man should have sons!” intoned with a sort of stentorian Abrahamic authority. I do seem to remember that it was amidst a rebuke delivered to a disappointing daughter or daughters. Having no sons of my own, none to carry forward the family name (what patriarchic bullshit) or to toss a ball with in the backyard (has anyone seen women’s softball or basketball these days), I could give a rat’s ass about extending my “male lineage.”

No thanks. Had I to do it all over again I’d take, without the slightest hesitation or regret, my daughters. Perhaps a man felt he should have sons back in Old Testament times (when Leviticus allowed a man to sell daughters into slavery if he chose to), but I have little need for shepherds or warriors, and I have been provided grandsons who throw a ball no better than my twin granddaughters.

I know that this is Father’s Day and I am supposed to receive a necktie (never did actually) or a card or from my girls (more likely a phone call, a text or email these days), but I am reversing things a little; the occasion has got me reflecting on how fortunate I have been to be gifted with Laura and Lisa. Indeed, they retain discernible strains of the beauty, loving nature and maternal goodness of their long late mother (and perhaps a snippet from the male side of their DNA endowment). They have been my life raft, my pride and joy, never a disappointment or regret, even through those years when teen girls are alleged to drive parents to hallucinatory substances, or giving the slightest justification to sell them into slavery.