On Father’s Day

Dad,

Thank you for making us practice phoning the house from the public telephone across the street. I felt silly, and even a little scared, but I get it now.

Thank you for making our bored teenage faces climb mountains and hike beaches and visit Lesotho.

Thank you for spending money, when we had extra, not on your car, but on taking us places that we’d never been before.

Thank you for constantly reminding me that ‘things,’ although sometimes deserved, and sometimes special, are not that important.

Thank you for never buying me a cellphone.

Thank you for telling me that no one was watching me when I was trying something new and I was too afraid to fail. ‘No one is watching you, my girl’ has always allowed me to reassess, to cut my ego to size. It has allowed me to do what I want. To try.

Thank you for building tree houses with us.

Thank you for allowing me to take an interest in anything, and encouraging it, but always making it my responsibility to get done. Thank you for never forcing or coercing me into a career of your liking.

Thank you for telling me that I am beautiful.

Thank you for telling Mom that she is beautiful.

Thank you for having made us sit down at the table and eat together as a family. Thank you for eating vegetables.

Thank you for explaining, in full detail: investment banking, mechanic’s invoices, telephone bills, maturity funds, Lord of the Rings, how electricity works, pythagoras’ theorem, tax, g-force, democracy, catchment areas, how the forest acts as a big tea bag, el Niño, religion and how to always win at tic-tac-toe.

Thank you for reading to me.

Thank you for playing us music, even if it wasn’t very good, re: Mike Oldfield. Thank you for loving Led Zeppelin. Thank you for always dancing.

Thank you for indulging my idealism, my melancholic streak, and my romantic self-involvement, but also for batting it back with your pragmatism.

Thank you for telling me to grow up and stop acting like a child.

Thank you for making me laugh.

Thank you for taking us swimming on an Israeli beach when I was about eight years old in the middle of the night to go shoot out the back of waves while fireworks were going off behind us.

Thank you for family talks, where things got said. Thank you for always allowing me to cry.

Thank you for loving me enough that I have never had to go look for love in all the wrong places to replace ‘you.’ A cliché, but clichés exist for a reason.

Thank you for always turning off the television to listen to me. And for always trying to understand.

Thank you for playing the Goon Show on family holiday car trips.

Love.

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