Originally published in Oregon Quarterly

Hallmark cards were not made for this guy.Father’s Day was a big deal in my house not just because it was Father’s Day, and my father was one to whom homage was paid, the coins of the realm being argyle socks and cans of Wilson tennis balls, but because it ushered in the annual allowance-draining third week in June. This was the week that included Father’s Day, my father’s birthday and my parents’ anniversary. One, two, three, right in a row. Every week during the six months between Christmas and the third week in June I put away a part of my allowance (which topped out at $2.50 when I was a senior in high school) to buy gifts for these three occasions.I am remembering this thirty, oh-my-God forty years later, because today June 18, 2006 is my first fatherless Father’s Day. My father died last year, August 1, in his bed, in his apartment, after breakfast. One of the home health ladies was with him, the big, pillowy, Sweet-Jesus-I’m-born-again woman whose name I don’t recall. My father was a casual, northern-bred racist whose only expressed thoughts about Blacks (and Puerto Ricans) were that they brought down property values. I’m not sure, exactly, what he thought about being cared for by Black women – all his home caregivers were Black women – but I imagine he considered them domestic servants, which in a way they were, and dealt with it like that. When I was growing up, we had had a Black woman come in to clean our house every Thursday, driven in from Amityville, where the Black people lived, in a car with four other Black women who were delivered to other homes in our neighborhood.It may be that my father didn’t think about his caregivers at all, that who they were, what they did, where he was, what was going on, all that just didn’t register. In those last six months when he needed 24-hour care, his mind was somewhere else. His brain, robbed of good blood flow by years of coronary artery disease, was sluggish, cloudy, clogged. I don’t know how to describe it, only that much of who I thought my father was, was missing those last six months.My father had been a stubborn, often nasty, irascible man. He pulled no punches. You knew where you stood with him, and where you stood was usually in the doghouse. He disliked a lot of things, including people who sneezed, people who left the lights on in a room after they left, people who sat around and read all day, all auto mechanics, most drivers, especially women, anyone who rang the doorbell – and often, even when I didn’t fall into any of those categories, me. He was quick with insults, and even quicker with withering looks. But when his brain started to die, he lost most of his edge. He didn’t talk much or seem to be listening. He lay in his bedroom in his hospital bed propped up by pillows, surrounded by my mother’s paintings, which hung on all four walls. He lay there with the TV on, a night table crowded with prescription medicine bottles on one side, a big Black woman on the other, and his heart kept beating and beating until one morning, after breakfast, it didn’t.When I had left home and was sending Father’s Day cards and gifts across the country every June, finding an appropriate card was always a problem. I’d stand in front of the Dads and Grads card displays in bookstores and newsstands -- Chicago, San Francisco, Carbondale, McMinnville, Seattle, Eugene, I moved around a lot in those years – and for as long as it took, half an hour or more, I’d open and read every card hoping to find one I could send. I couldn’t send one of those you’re-the-best-guy-ever cards. That would have been so insincere as to be insulting. Then there were the we-had-great-times-together cards which, until recently, until too late, I wouldn’t think of sending because I mostly remembered our Saturdays on the tennis court with my father yelling at me after every shot. I remembered crying on my side of the court, happy at least that he couldn’t see the effect he was having on me. Now, of course, I think about the fact that he actually took me out every Saturday, that we not only played tennis, but in the winter, went roller skating and ice skating and bowling. He took me horseback riding. We stopped at Carvelles on the way home. We both loved chocolate. (Among my father’s dislikes were people who ordered vanilla ice cream.)But when my father was still a Man in Full, when I was still locked in battle with him – which is to say, from puberty to about two years ago -- I remembered our time together as stressful and unpleasant, yet another excuse for him to criticize and belittle me. So I couldn’t send the thanks-for-a-great-time cards. There was also a whole genre of he-did-everything-and-he-did it well cards, which I couldn’t send, and I-hope-I-grow-up-just-like-you cards, which, needless to say, I didn’t. Hope that I’d grow up to be just like him, that is. That left very few cards. Sappy ones were out. Religious ones were out. Ones with men on golf courses were out. And so I stood in front of many a card rack, looking at cards and putting them back, a lump in my throat. Because I didn’t have the kind of father about whom Hallmark made cards. Because I didn’t have the kind of relationship with my father about which Hallmark made cards. Because he didn’t love me. Because, maybe worse, I didn’t love him. But each year I managed to find a card and send it from wherever I was to where he was, which was always 3728 Richard Lane. I could, if I wanted to, see the cards I selected all those years because they are in a box in the closet in my house. My father saved all of them. I brought them home with me after he died.We find out too late how much people mean to us and how much we meant to them, or that we meant anything at all to them. The last time I saw my father alive, in the spring, he was bedridden and mostly silent. I made him my mother’s chicken parmesan, one of his favorite dishes, which I didn’t want him to eat from a tray sitting up in bed. I wanted us to have a meal together at the table. It took two of us to get him out of bed and into a wheelchair. I wheeled him into the dining room, and he sat at the table staring straight ahead, slowly, slowly moving a shaky hand up to his mouth, slowly, slowly, chewing his food, which I had cut up in tiny pieces. My father, the irascible father of my childhood, would never have stood for anyone eating like that. I could almost hear that father sighing, clucking, muttering under his breath. Come on, already. Let’s go. Jeezus H. Christ.My father, the nasty one, was an eater. Portions could not be too big for him. He judged the worth of restaurants based on how much of his dinner plate was obscured. The ideal plate, invisible under mounds of food, would be 75 percent meat, 25 percent potato, 0 percent vegetable and 1000 percent sodium. But that spring, sitting in the wheelchair, staring ahead, struggling to eat, he finished perhaps half of one small portion, maybe an ounce or two of chicken, not much more than a bite my father of old would have taken. Then grunted and waved his hand in the air, dismissing the meal.During the long days of my last visit, not knowing what to do but knowing I should be doing something, I gave my father foot massages while I told him stories about the Saturdays we spent together: sledding breakneck down the hill at Bethpage State Park, the time the horse almost rolled over on me, the time he bowled 225, the time we almost fell through the ice at the pond, sundaes at Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlour that we didn’t tell my mother about. He stared up at the ceiling while I talked. He dozed. He didn’t seem to be listening. It probably too late to tell him all this.The last thing my father said to me was actually the only full sentence he said to me during my visit that spring. He had uttered an occasional yes or no in response to direct questions, but he had never initiated a conversation. That afternoon, he was lying in the hospital bed, and I was bending over him rubbing moisturizer into his hands. My long hair – you look like Cousin It, he used to say to me – fell in front of my face. I swept it back over my ear and smiled at him. His eyes were focused, and I knew he was going to say something. “You’ve got gray hair,” he said to me. “Do something about it.”That’s the last thing I ever heard from my father. The bastard. I miss him.