I don’t think of my father much except on Father’s Day; I think it takes a holiday to remind me to focus on the influence and impact on me.

Fathers are the voices in our heads that we carry through life. So it’s worth thinking about them once a year.

My father – I had no name for him, I could not call him “Dad” – has been dead for more than a generation now, and what I’ve figured out about Father’s Day for me is that every year I see him in a different light and learn something new about our relationship.

Bit by bit, he is emerging through the fog of emotion.

I never really knew what to make of him for most of my life, and he never knew what to make of me.

I also get to reflect on myself as a father; that is the harder part. I don’t always like what I see; it helps me not to blame him.

A father casts a long shadow on a son or a daughter, and since mine died, I’ve had more freedom to live my own life without my hopes for a closer relationship with him.

I can also move farther away from his disappointment in me.

I don’t need to fight with him anymore; I can accept him and understand him. So that feels a lot better; that’s a better place.

Fathers are a chapter in life you can only revisit but never rewrite. Being a father humbled me. It isn’t easy, even if you are sane.

I always wanted to write a novel about a father who doesn’t get the son he wanted and has to live with that for the rest of his lifeBut, I think it was too close to write.

I think that was the load my father had to carry. I spent so much time worrying about what happened to me, but what about what happened to him?

As the years have passed, I’ve come to see my father in a gentler and kinder light. George Julius Katz – the first time I’ve ever mentioned his full name in anything I wrote – was a good man by all accounts; he loved helping people in need.

His marriage was almost pathologically unhappy.

He struggled to come to terms with my creative and unhappy mother,  my sister Jane, a brilliant and sensitive and troubled child, and me,  bed-wetting, book and fish geek who refused to play basketball or try out for Little League and who wet his bed until he was 17 and spent hours along with his tropical fish.

This was definitely not the son George Katz hoped to have.

From the first, my father and me were at odds. He wanted to make me into a stronger, tougher man.

He wasn’t vicious or frightening, he rarely shouted,  he never abused me physically, but there was almost nothing in the world, from sports to politics to how each of us lived, that we saw in the same way.

When he looked at me, I could see the sadness and worry in his eyes. He didn’t know what to do about me.

I suppose making your oddball son feel worthless is abusive in its own way, but I know now he meant no harm; he was trying to help me have a better life than he had.

He thought if I  became an athlete, people would like and respect me and offer me jobs.

And I would stop wetting my bed.

He thought I was a sissy.

But that was his story, not mine. As it turned out, writing did for me what basketball did for him. It pulled me up and out; it gave me a life.

George Katz saw his own father drop dead of a  heart attack when he was 14, and his mother died shortly after that; he grew up in poverty and was lifted out of it by sports.

He was a star basketball player, and athleticism brought him friends, a career in social work and a lifetime of physical activity and good health.

My father played tennis every day well into his 80’s until a dreadful car crash cost him one leg and his mobility. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

He never once complained or felt sorry for himself.

He never spoke poorly of his life, as unhappy as it sometimes was. An awful marriage poisons the and casts its own shadows over life. I guess he taught me that also.

My father wasted little time on introspection. He was not intuitive.

The day before he died, he told my sister that his one regret in life was that he couldn’t play tennis until the end.

I hated my father at times for the way he treated my mother and my sister, and for the way, he loved my brother, who was, in almost every way, the child he wanted – worshipful, athletic, and obedient.

You know the story. My brother could do no wrong; I could do no right.

My brother adored my father, and the two of them would talk sports and politics for hours on end. As strained as my talks with my father were, he and my brother talked easily for hours.

They just loved each other.

To me, everything they said was either stupid or banal; I couldn’t bear their conversations. I can’t imagine they were as dumb as I thought they were; I suspect that was just what I needed to hear.

Without knowing it or meaning to, my father taught me some of the cornerstone things I’ve carried into my life first, heHe never knowingly hurt anyone outside of his family. Second, he never spoke poorly of anyone or spoke harshly to anyone.

He loved doing good and felt it was his purpose in life. My father practiced radical acceptance before it became a Yuppie talking point. He never spoke poorly of life; he accepted it, no matter how difficult.

He demonstrated for me the power of small acts of great kindness – helping someone get a job, giving someone some money to buy food, getting a poor street person shoes, intervening to keep some messed up kid out of jail.

My father was not one of those fathers who wanted to hang out with us. He never once had breakfast with us the whole time I lived there; he went out every morning to eat at a diner with some of his friends.

We spent no time together.

He brought me to Gettysburg once, the only time we spent together alone in my life. He was going there for work, and my mother badgered him into taking me with him. He was working most of the time on that trip; I didn’t see much of him.

I loved the battlefield, though.

Once a year, he would take my sister and me to Fenway Park to see the Red Sox, a team he loved and followed closely every day they played.

One of the only memories I have of us together was when he took me to Fenway Park to see the great Ted Williams bat for the last time.

He was a ghost in my life. He knew nothing of my friends, my work in school, what I did most afternoons when I got home.

He was never home in the morning and went out almost every night, often to pick up a reward or engraved plaque for the many good deeds he did.

He shaped my life. Fathers will do that, of course, whether you want them to or not.

Doing good is a huge part of my life but, like him, I made a shambles of one marriage, and unlike him, I was restless and anxious; I was never able to settle down until much later in life.

Like my father, I often found it easier to be closest to the people outside of my family, people with always a safe distance.

They say a son estranged from his father is by definition a self-taught man, and that is the truth, at least for me.

My father never taught me a thing besides catching a baseball, and I was never very good at that.

I’m still learning the best way to shave.

The hard thing about my father and me was not that he was any monster; I know he wasn’t.

The tough thing was that he didn’t love me; he didn’t know how to do it. was no picnic, I think, to be my father.

People are shocked when I say that – even shrinks – but I know it’s true after all of these years. I accept it.

As a father myself, I’ve realized that love is the greatest gift a parent can give a child. I think they can survive almost anything else but not being loved.

I did not experience real love until I met Maria and married her. Once that happened, I came to understand that the real problem was between my father and me.

I didn’t love him either; that was the other hard part.

My father took the ability to cry away from me. I was sad too often to cry.

He could never hide his disappointment in me.

“You just need to live up to your potential,” he told me almost every day as if potential was something I could live up to by pulling some magical switch.

In The Ability To Cry,  the novelist Yivun Li ponders her father’s last days and her abiding desire for a closer relationship with him.

But I never wanted a closer relationship with my father; I didn’t want to be around him, to listen to his cliches and platitudes, his endless disenchantment with me, the eternal child of potential.

I understand what having potential really means. It means you’re failing at the moment.

There are so many dimensions to fatherhood.

On this day, I often reflect on my own experience as a father and go over the things I should have done, should not have done, and could have done better.

In many ways, I believe I was no better a father than I had, and how could I, really? I wasn’t sure what being a father was; I spent too much time trying not to be mine.

And when I started to fall apart, I ran away to the mountains, leaving my daughter to navigate her life at a vulnerable time.

As a father, I was in trouble with my daughter; we couldn’t seem to talk about it.

When my father died, he and I hadn’t had a conversation with one another for many years. When we did, it was about sports or politics, or he would explain to me how the TV show I produced could be much better.

It had great potential, he insisted.

In almost every book I’ve read about father, I read the story of two men. The father the family knew, and the father the world beyond knew. They were very rarely the same.

Inside the house, my mother and father battled furiously, day and night, about almost everything.

No one ever heard my father raise his voice outside the house or say a cruel or cutting thing.

A few weeks before his death, I went to see my father one last time, and I decided to have the conversation, you know, the thing children and their dying and estranged parents have.

For the first time in our lives together, we agreed. Finally we were able to tell the truth to each other.

I told him he wasn’t the father I wished I had, and I wasn’t the son he wished he had. It was a liberating moment, good for both of us.

Speaking that truth to me helped me love him for the first time.

It wasn’t as if we didn’t each know it, but it made all the difference, being honest about it.

As I finished writing this, my Iphone rang, and it was my daughter Emma and her daughter Robin calling from Cape Cod to wish me a Happy Father’s Day.

Emma read my piece last night about my pangs at seeing those photos of her and Robin on the beach, the same beach she and I used to walk on, and she didn’t want to upset me by sending more beach photos.

She knew I missed being there with them; that beach was a favorite spot of ours.

I told her I loved the photos, and I was overwhelmed by how good a photographer she is, despite having what I called a “piece of shit Nikon camera.” (I can’t resist taunting Nikon people, I know their cameras are good.)

I said I was celebrating Father’s Day by buying her a new Canon 5D  Mark IV, a significant step up for her but not so expensive as to be in the stratosphere.

The photos she sent me from the beach gave me this idea, and I knew I had to do it.

As many of you know, creative tools are almost sacred for me, and I appreciate the chance to give them to my daughter.

To my surprise, Emma (who asks for nothing ever) said she would love that, providing I didn’t spend too much money and go broke.

I told her the truth. Nothing would make me happier than being able to buy her this camera and watching her continue to grow as a photographer. She is a natural.

Her photography has brought us closer and deepened our sometimes troubled connection.

Her pictures are more than pictures to me; they are soul connections that lift my heart. When she next comes to visit, I hope we can go on a photoshoot together.

I said I could handle it.

Emma and I have had some ups and downs in our relationship, but I feel we’ve gotten to a wonderful place over the past couple of years. We talk openly and freely and permit ourselves to love each other without drama or regret.

We both cared and did the work we needed to do.

As we were about to say goodbye, I said I had one last question to ask;

“Emma, we’ve had some bumps, and I had some apologizing to do. I feel like we’re in a good place, but we haven’t actually discussed that for a while. Is that right? Are we in a good place?”

Yes, she said, laughing. “We’re in a good place.”

Are there any problems we should be talking about?,  I asked.

“No,” she said, “there are no problems we should be talking about.”

And then she and Robin sang Happy Father’s Day together.

All in all, a pretty good Father’s Day. How could it be better than that?

(Photo by Emma Span. Robin Takes On The Beach.)