Moms undoubtedly taste joys that I’ll never comprehend, but I can say that a dad’s joys come fast and furious. Sure, some days they’re hidden in the valleys, but on many other days, they’re on full display, strewn along the path and around the summit. Each one is a blessing, a revelation. They’re never promised. And no day is quite like the other.
I took two of my sons to Antietam National Battlefield for the first time the other day. As we walked across Miller’s Cornfield — dry corncobs and husks crunching beneath our feet — we fell into long silences, struck by the immensity of human loss. The bloodiest day in our nation’s history.
Afterward, we went out for lunch. Just us. No screens. The conversation going here and there. Lee’s retreat. An upcoming calculus test. The Russian tendency toward expansionism. Burnside’s Bridge. The tasty fries.
I thought of my dad — taken by cancer three years ago — and how I never had to coax his attention away from a smartphone in my pre-internet childhood. How blessed am I to carry the fire of his memory, his presence. The majestic human cadence of such a childhood.
At Mass recently, I watched as all five of our kids went up to receive Communion in the line ahead of me. I was suddenly dizzy, thinking of the miracle of their lives, of Christ’s body uniting with theirs.
“The body of Christ.”
“Amen,” I heard each of the kids say, and their amens shot through my entire frame as I heard my heart answering amen with them.
Several days a week we FaceTime with our firstborn — now in her first year of college — as she strides across her vast campus to class. She averages six miles a day. I am such a blessed man, I think, as I find myself suddenly with her for a few hundred yards, talking about her day, walking this amazing young woman to macroeconomics.
I remember my dad’s visit during my freshman year of college, 700 miles from home. He was the only dad I ever saw smoking a pipe on the campus. One day he marched me into a department store and said, “Hey guy, what do you need? You all set for shirts? Socks? Ties? How about a sports coat?” He worked through a checklist of a young man’s wardrobe, concerned that his son might be missing something. I later learned that when he set off to college in 1963, his dad took him as far as the local bus stop. I remember this, and my gratitude surges.
My dad told us stories that I need to get better at handing down. Like how my immigrant great-grandfather worked at a gashouse in Chicago while his bride cleaned houses. They put aside $5 a week until they had the $300 they needed to go for their dream — a 10-acre farm. But it turned out the land they bought from an agent was sandy. The farm went under in three years, and he went back to decades of assembly-line work at Nash Motors in Kenosha. A joy for him was to take his kids down the street for ice cream on Sunday afternoons. He liked to hum and sing hymns around the house. My parents sang those same hymns at home, and now I’m doing my part.
The joys are often hidden in plain sight, as I was reminded recently, coming across a memory I recorded of my oldest daughter when she was 4.
“Aren’t you going to ask me about school?” she asked me one night as I was going to turn off her light.
I stayed. I asked. Details surged — her hands traced the shape of her teacher’s earrings. That day on the playground, she was one of the three pigs with Faith and Sanai — and Porter was the big bad wolf. “He didn’t eat us,” she said. Her gaze played on the ceiling as if the record of her day was written there. More detail. “Chicken nuggets. And I didn’t finish my milk.”
Our lives are like this: so much of beauty still left in the fields at night, the gleaners weary. The fathers’ hearts light with the joy of it all.
Johnson and his wife, Ever, are co-founders of trinityhouseCommunity.org.
Christ commands us to love