I Miss My Dad
Sports, Thornton Wilder, and the Biggest Smallest Things
One of the last things I told my dad over the phone before he died last year was how awful I thought the Carolina Panthers’ NFL season would be.
He was maybe a week or more from passing and hopped up on pain meds, so his ability to hold a lucid thought wasn’t guaranteed.
Hearing my dire sports forecast, he replied with a surprised chuckle, saying, “Ohh…”
I look back on the call and wonder why I chose that subject in what I knew were likely his final days on earth. To be honest, I rarely knew how to speak to my dad, so subjects like sports or the weather were usually our go-tos in conversation.
But now I realize it was more than just small talk. No one in my family has ever had any great athletic ability. But all of us (including my sisters and mom) have been lifelong sports fans. Sports were always on TV growing up; we rooted for our home teams and spoke often about their highs and lows. So in that sense, it was only natural that I’d speak to my dad about sports, even when his time was short.
But now, nearly a year from his passing, I feel its importance in my bones. Autumn is one of the best times of the year for sports lovers with football, basketball, and baseball all being played at the same time. My instinct the last few months when I’ve watched a game or read a sports story has been to pick up the phone and call my dad to see what he thinks.
Wow. The Panthers aren’t much better than last year, right Dad? Can you believe the Seattle Mariners might go to their first World Series? I just read that Tiger Woods has to have another surgery. Do you think he’ll ever play professional golf again?
I don’t have anyone to discuss these things with now, at least not in the way I did with my dad. As goes the cliché, it was something I didn’t know I’d miss until it was gone.
Is sports just superficial, surface conversation? Sure. But with my dad, it was a way for a father and son—who had as many differences as they had things in common; who had a troubled relationship in my adolescent years—it was how we were able to connect. It was our launching pad for checking in. Sometimes it led into deeper conversation, but even when it didn’t, I now see its value in a way I didn’t appreciate before.
Every family is different—every relationship between husband and wife, parent and child. If you surveyed my siblings, they’d likely tell you ways they connected with my dad that were completely different from mine. In many parent-child relationships, people share their deepest feelings at different points along the way. But that was rarely the case with us. We bonded instead over the superficial depths of sports and the weather.
You Don’t Know What You Have
In the stage play Our Town by Thornton Wilder, Emily is a young woman who dies in her mid-20s while giving birth. In the afterlife, she’s offered the opportunity to go back and witness one day of her life over again. She’s encouraged to choose an unimportant day. It will be important enough.
Traveling with the play’s narrator, the “Stage Manager,” Emily chooses her 12th birthday.
It’s early morning in her town of Grover’s Corners and very chilly. She sees Main Street and the old drug store as they were in her childhood. She can’t believe she’d forgotten about the old white fence that surrounded her house. And there’s the milkman, Howie Newsome, making his morning deliveries! The paperboy, Joe Crowell, is busy doing the same.
Inside the house, her mother is making breakfast. Her father has just returned from a trip on the morning train. 12-year-old Emily scurries down the stairs to see several birthday gifts waiting for her on the table. One is wrapped in blue paper from her Aunt Carrie. Another, wrapped in yellow, is a keepsake garment her grandmother used to wear. There’s also a postcard album from young George Gibbs, the boy she would one day marry.
Soon, it’s too much for the deceased Emily to handle. She asks the Stage Manager to take her back. But first, she wants to look on her town one more time and say goodbye.
“Goodbye, world. Goodbye, Grover’s Corners...Mama and Papa. Goodbye to clocks ticking, and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths, and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”
She looks at the Stage Manager and asks, “Do human beings ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?”
He replies, “Saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”
The Biggest Smallest Things
I assume you see why Thornton Wilder’s play came to mind.
One reason you probably don’t know though is—and I didn’t remember this till I was writing it just now—my dad and I were once actors in this play. I played the young paperboy, and my dad, the Stage Manager.
But of course, I also look back on those everyday, unimportant conversations with my dad and feel a bit like Emily. I’m no saint or poet, but I have learned about seeing the eternal value in the smallest things. As with now, I see them more often when looking back than while they’re happening. But at least I see them.
Did my dad and I have some dramatic emotional breakthrough before he died, healing all our past wounds? No. Did we talk about death and what we meant to each other? Not exactly. We did, however briefly at the end, talk about sports.
Well, there was one more phone call.
Just days before he passed, he could barely speak or think clearly, but he still asked to speak with me. I already knew what he wanted. The last few years I’d taken over my parents’ finances, making sure their bills were paid, their affairs were in order, and that my mom would be taken care of after my dad was gone.
He tried to get out the words, but I interrupted him, saying, “It’s OK, Dad. I’ve taken care of everything. You have nothing to worry about. Mom’s going to be just fine.”
He sighed into the phone with what sounded like relief. Then he muttered his last words to me, saying: “I love you, Joe.”
He invoked my brother’s name, not mine. But I knew exactly who he meant.
John’s Latest Book
A gathering of over two decades of reflections, Unto Life says we don’t have to wait for heaven to start living eternally in the here-and-now. It demonstrates this by reflecting on topics like nature, the arts, spiritual growth, contentment, weakness, relationships, mission, life and death.
I love this very much, John. ❤️ mark