Why Every Day Is Father’s Day
By Sandra Sanchez, Voxxi
It’s the little things that remind me of my dad always – not just on Father’s Day.
Like when I peel an orange and rather than reach for a napkin to wipe my hands, I remember how my chemical-engineer father would always say to use the inside of the orange peel as a natural sponge. “It has drying properties,” he would chirp.
Or whenever someone gets stung by a wasp or a bee, I remember how he’d drop to the ground, grab a mound of mud (or add water to some dry dirt) and slap them with a fresh-made mud pack. “It soaks out the poisons,” he would say.
My father has always been a little different, but endearingly so. He loves telling puns, solving Sudoku puzzles and playing tennis. His jokes, however, often fall flat because they are on an ethereal, scientific level, clouds above most of us.
I might be 45-years-old, but his voice still echoes in my mind as if I were 8 years old and looking up to him and thinking he was the smartest man God ever created.
When I was a young girl I thought he drove a train. He said he was an engineer, after all. Then I thought he worked at the U.S. Treasury Department, because he told me he went to work “to make money.”
Over the years, the roles of parent and child have reversed in my family. Now, when he visits me and my family, I feel like I need to care for him. It was always the other way around growing up. But I don’t mind, because he modeled what it is to be a tolerant and loving parent.And I try to do that for my own children.
My younger brother, my only sibling, is severely mentally handicapped, suffers from grand mal epileptic seizures and cannot speak. His care took my mother away from me a lot growing up, but my father was always there to give me the attention I craved.
He took me to dance competitions and, despite dropped batons and missed tapped steps, he was always proud.
When I was a high school cheerleader in Maryland, he would spend hours in the stands cheering me on during frigid football games. I don’t think he ever saw one touchdown pass.
I passed high school math only because of his nightly tutorial sessions and incredible patience.
When I competed for Maryland All State Band, he didn’t complain as I practiced my flute while he drove the Beltway through heavy Washington, D.C.-area traffic.
He and my mom still keep the stories I wrote as a reporter for USA TODAY. And they collect the columns and magazine articles that I write now.
His unending appreciation and approval has been a constant in my life, as it should be for all girls. It has empowered me with confidence and security. He is the smartest voice in my head.
I’m not saying life has been easy. We all have travails. But no matter what I am working through, I can count on the fact that he will listen with interest and then he will offer a joke that will go way above my head. And I will laugh.
This article first appeared in Voxxi.
Sandra Sanchez is a former reporter for USA TODAY who covered the Los Angeles riots and other events in the 1990s. She was assistant national editor for the Austin American-Statesman at the turn of the millennium and is currently assistant opinion editor for the Waco Tribune-Herald. She has three children and two dogs and lives in Waco, Texas with her husband and family.
[Photo By apdk]