This summer, July 17-19, I’m offering a mini-session of our popular Write Together sessions, in which we gather on Zoom for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening and write quietly together from a guided prompt. Cost: $100. Please click here for all the details. I’d love to see you in the Zoom room. 

Once, a father called his daughter on her 33rd birthday and left a message on the answering machine.

“Happy 33rd!” he said. “Happy 33rd.”

Pause. Pause. Pause.

His daughter stood by, wondering if that was the end of it. Then came a clearing of the throat and a mumbled I love you.The daughter opened the answering machine and snatched out the tape on which her father’s message was recorded. It was the first time she’d ever heard him say that.

I am that daughter. All these years later I still have that tape, an old Radio Shack cassette.

Blessings on the fathers, all the fathers, and all the men who stand in as fathers. The fathers who are able to say “I love you” easily and often, and the fathers who aren’t. The father who pushes his child on the swing, higher and higher, and the father who lets his child hitch a ride on his wheelchair.

The father who scratches out a budget in pencil on lined yellow paper, the better to show his daughter where it all goes when she says in teenage superiority, But where could it all go? How can there be none left at the end of the month? The father who comes stumbling out of his baby’s bedroom late at night and throws himself into a chair, saying, I spend half my life in a dark room, singing. The father who untangles his child’s bobber from the weeds where she has cast it yet again, and the father who stands  his child on his feet to dance her around the room.

Blessings on the father who wore blue coveralls for the barn and washed up in Lava soap. On the father who grew old and forgot where he left the car. On the father who let his child twirl on the stool at the diner, who pulled her up the hill on the toboggan, who taught her how to make scrambled eggs. Blessings on the father who cried on the plane home from visiting his first grandchild and told his wife I wish I could do it all over. I wish I could do a better job.

Dressing My Father-in-Law for Burial, by Benjamin Cutler

I would have tied the tie differently:
full Windsor, centered and snug
against the white, pressed collar.

But his oldest son wanted the job—
and who could deny him this right?

So I watched—half Windsor,
knot too tight, loop overly loose
around the unbuttoned neck

as though the man were ready
for his after-work commute.

See him now, this grieving son—
hands atremble and earnest—tying 
Dad’s final tie: inexpertly, imperfectly.

But isn’t this how any of us love?—
the only way we know how.

Click here for more information about poet Benjamin Cutler. Today’s poem can be found in his brand-new collection, Wild Silence.

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