Fathers’ Influence Still Important

Father’s Day always finds me remembering when my dad and I planted a tree.

It wasn’t much of a tree, just a white birch sapling so spindly that it needed a bracing pole and wire supports to keep it upright. But it was the first tree my father had ever planted.

He’d purchased it for the front lawn of the first house he’d ever owned. That was in 1961 in Red Deer, Alberta, in western Canada.

A couple years later the house was sold and we moved. As we drove away, I looked back at the house to see the still-braced tree standing alone, the dry, curled remains of its leaves scattered across the autumn- brown lawn.

Thirty-five years later, my father long dead and myself the father of a young son, I parked across the street from my childhood home.

The tree was still there, but it didn’t need support anymore. It had grown tall and thick-trunked, with long, green-leafed branches spreading high above the small house.

Looking at the tree, remembering, I felt something in me break. For a moment, I was a boy again, crouching beside the bent figure of my father in his blue, dirt-smudged trousers as he tamped the earth around the base of the tree with the flat of a shovel.

There’s a theory that the universe we inhabit is only one of an infinite number of universes, each as real as our own, each following a separate stream of evolution from that of our world.

I tried to take some solace from this notion as I looked at my father’s tree.

Like all sons, I’m still trying to understand what Sigmund Freud called the most poignant loss in a man’s life. Even now, 15 years after dad’s death, I still think of him most every day.

And in remembering him, I’ve come to recognize his influence on my life.

For a good part of my life he loomed over me, a commanding, deep-voiced presence. Even when absent from the dinner table, his authority was implicit in the chair at the head of the table that my mother left empty.

You hear a lot nowadays about the “crisis of fatherhood.” Indeed, our culture’s ambivalence toward fatherhood, and even its hostility, is evident in the way fathers are portrayed on television.

In three decades we’ve gone from the beneficence of “Father Knows Best” and “Bonanza” to the domineering maternalism of “Home Improvement” and the near-psychotic Al Bundy character in “Married…with Children.”

Social scientists say that many of our social ills - increasing divorce rates, youth suicide and even school shootings - can be linked to the denigration of the traditional roles and requirements of fatherhood.

Psychologists have long understood that mothers lay the foundation for a child’s sense of security and trust. But what is not so readily grasped is that sons seek out their fathers because they symbolize manhood as a living reality.

The way a father relates to his wife provides the son with a model for the role of a husband. A daughter learns from her father how she can expect to be treated by other men when she’s a woman. The way a father acts in society sets the pattern for a child’s public conduct.

It seems that most fathers do their duty by their children. A recent study by Statistics Canada found that 84 percent of Canadian children live in two-parent families and that a majority “function well.” Whatever that might mean, I know my brother and I were certainly more obedient when dad was around.

Some of my favorite memories, however, are of being alone with him. I remember as a young boy how happy I was when he took me on a fishing trip.

I also remember my pride in accompanying him on a trip up the Alaska Highway. But my father’s influence runs deeper than memory. The older I get, the more I see him in myself.

The face I offer to the world is increasingly his. My attitudes and modes of conduct, good and bad, are largely informed by whatever sensibility I absorbed, osmosis-like, from him.

Like him, I prefer dark solid colors, bright ties and my shirt sleeves rolled above my wrists (two folds, never three).

Sometimes, I fantasize he is still alive in some alternative universe and that my “alternative” son has grown up learning from him, as I did.

But of course in this world, on this Father’s Day, I am left with only memory - and the sight out my kitchen window of a backyard birch tree that my son and I planted a few years ago.