The Gift of Time: Ode to a Father

My dad figured something out very early into his parenting years. Actually, my guess is that he figured it out before he ever had children. Maybe he figured it out when his own father died when my dad was 12. His dad left behind eight children—one not yet born—and a wife, at the height of the Great Depression. Dad, as the oldest child, took over the role of father for his siblings and consultant and confidante for his mother, who needed someone she could trust and rely on during the coming difficult years. Dad took on a lot of responsibility early in life, and it changed him. The changes, some of which were good and some of which were not so good, became a permanent part of his personality.

What my dad figured out was that the time we spend with anyone—our parents, our children, our friends, the cashiers at the grocery store—is the most lasting, most important, and greatest gift that we can give to another person. Dad did not shower us, his five children, with a lot of material gifts and certainly not with much in the way of financial gifts. But we knew him better than most of our friends knew their dads, and he knew us. I mean, really knew us, didn't just know about us.

Dad was comfortable with his children, which I took for granted growing up. It wasn't till I was a teenager and would visit friends' homes that I realized that not all fathers are comfortable with their kids. Not all fathers know not only what to talk to their children about, but how to talk to their kids. Dad was a natural with children, from the time they were babies through adulthood. He loved kids, and kids loved him. When I was little, not only did my siblings and I gravitate toward dad, but so did our cousins (who lived next door), as well as the neighborhood kids. For one thing, everyone knew who had popsicles in the summertime!

My dad loved baseball. The Brooklyn Dodgers were dad's team from day one. He and his brothers and friends would play stickball in the streets, and I'm sure that, just like the junior athletes of today, they all took on the identities of their favorite players.

When dad and mom moved their young family (just one child at the time, and another on the way) from NYC to Knoxville, Tennessee, they settled in a semirural area called Rocky Hill, nestled among the gentle hills between the city of Knoxville and Nowheresville. Dad saw what was missing from this rural paradise right away: Little League. He and some of the other dads of the burgeoning movement that would become known as the Baby Boomers got together and formed a league in Rocky Hill. Dad was very involved in Rocky Hill Little League for as long as we remained in Knoxville. They got baseball fields installed on Alki Lane. I will never forget Alki Lane. It is seared into my very skin. I spent most of my summer days playing in the hot dust under the bleachers there as each of my three brothers took their turns in their respective games. It seemed as if baseball games went on forever. If I sat out on the bleachers with my mom, under the unblinking eye of the summer sun, my fair skin would be bright red within a few minutes and I knew that days of misery would follow. Therefore, my sister and I and all of the other little siblings of Little League players, would roll around in the dust under the bleachers.

But dad never missed a game. He coached, he umped, he attended all of the Little League meetings, and even if he hadn't been involved in all of that, he would have never missed a game. My dad LOVED baseball.

I had assumed that my turn would come to join the girl equivalent of Little League. I actually looked forward to it. Ironically, when we weren't at Alki Lane, my family and all of the neighborhood kids were in our spacious yard, playing...baseball, of course. My brothers had taught me how to throw the ball so that they would not have to suffer the shame of having a sibling who threw like a girl. I was a fair enough player that I was allowed into the neighborhood games. That's not saying much, since we had to employ imaginary players anyway, so real bodies were preferred over having too many imaginary ones. I think that part of the draw of playing organized ball was that I knew that my dad loved the game, so I was assured that he would come to my games.

However, my family moved off to Atlanta before my turn to start playing organized softball. Only three of us kids went with the folks to Atlanta, what with my older brothers having already gotten ensconced in local university life. We were all older by then, and since we didn't have any history with anyone in our new home, we had to start all over again. Alki Lane was no longer a part of the local landscape, and our new back yard was not big enough to accommodate a truly decent game of baseball. We kids all moved off into our own activities and cliques at school.

As teenagers, my sister and I discovered this interesting new game that was so egalitarian that almost anyone could play halfway decently. Since we were of a somewhat athletic bent but only mediocre in talent, we were drawn toward this weird new sport called soccer.

My dad loved baseball. He didn't know from soccer. We didn't even know much about soccer. But, under the tutelage of Frau Barnett, the German teacher/girls' soccer coach at our high school; her husband, whom we all called “Herr Frau”; and a wonderful and almost mythic Irishwoman, Mrs. McGee, whose daughter played with us, we learned. Mrs. McGee had 10 children, all of whom had played “football” since they could walk, and all of whom could literally do passing skills in circles around the rest of us, took a great interst in our new girls' soccer club.

You see, we couldn't be a team because there was no school funding for girls' soccer. So we had to form as a club. Another challenge was that no other high schools in our area had girls' soccer, so we had no one to play. We played boys' soccer teams, to provide them with full-field scrimmages during their season, and they routinely wiped the field with us. But for some reason, our pathetic little team held together. During the boys' off-season, we played girls' AYSO teams. These girls, of Amazonian proportions, had been playing together since they emerged from the womb. They routinely creamed us much worse than the boys did (the boys having, at least, some idea that they should be nice to us because we were girls).

Because we couldn't have school fields during any season when any other sport was using them, our “season” was from January to March. We played in rain. We played in electrical storms. We played in sleet, in freezing cold, and when sheets of ice covered the entire city of Atlanta. Since the grass was dead when we played, we usually ended up playing in mud. We wore shorts when we played. (I was a much hardier lass then than I am now.) We were terrible, and I say with some pride that we played our hearts out and we never won a single game.

Our games were usually very, very early on Saturday mornings. Besides us players, the only people regularly in attendance were Frau, Herr Frau, and Mrs. McGee. There were no cheering parents or friends on the sidelines at our games. There were no siblings playing under the bleachers. Hell, there were no bleachers! There was nowhere to sit on the sidelines, and lawn chairs were kind of useless, what with the freezing cold, raging winter winds, rain and sleet.

Bill Burke never missed a single one of our games. He, alone among all of the parents, was there, along with the “Fraus” and the legendary Mrs. McGee. He watched every game with the intensity of someone who was really interested in soccer. After each game, dad would pepper my sister and me with questions about specific plays, about what had happened and why, about rules and refs' calls. He seemed intent on absorbing as much as possible about soccer.

And yet, DAD LOVED BASEBALL. I knew this. And in my heart of hearts, I knew that, though he was really trying, dad did not even understand soccer, much less love it.

This left me to draw a rather stunning conclusion. Dad didn't love baseball. Dad didn't love Little League. Dad didn't love coaching or umpiring or attending neighborhood meetings. Dad didn't love to spend summer days out in the overbearing Southern summer sun nor did he love to spend winter days outdoors in the sleet and wind.

Dad loved us. His children. He loved each and every one of us, and he cared what we were involved in. If we were interested in it, then, by golly, he was going to learn about it. And, on top of everything else, he was going to be there.

Dad didn't give us much. Dad gave us everything. He gave us the gift of his time.