Some Bittersweet Memories of Life With Father : He Taught Us to ‘Try’

Father. Fathers loved and fathers feared, close fathers and distant fathers, famous fathers and “ordinary” fathers. No matter what the relationship, he’s special. In the remembrances that follow, Times writers tell something of what that relationship has meant.

My dad is not a demonstrative guy. No lectures, no speeches. The only thing my dad ever made a big deal about when I was growing up was the subject of “trying.” He wasn’t going to push me in any particular direction, but whatever I decided to do, he wasn’t going to be satisfied unless I did my best. Every time.

It’s funny to write that down. It looks so bloody obvious, something everybody says. But a lot of people don’t learn what it means, or they stop remembering. My dad never forgot, and he never let me forget, and it took me a long time to understand what he was doing.

He was teaching me a lesson that would, years later, help me shut out all the garbage that people put on themselves about their “careers,” or their “future”--topics so grandiose that they’re beyond any individual’s real control. What he was teaching me was to simply concentrate on the moment. That’s what counts.

He didn’t say it that way, and I wouldn’t have heard it that way, and it wasn’t until a long time after I’d moved out of the house and had a job where I was supposed to be in charge of other people’s work that it hit me. I was having a discussion with a co-worker and I said something about trying, except that all of a sudden I heard my voice and it wasn’t my mine. It was my dad’s.

Like I said, the most obvious kind of stuff. But I got chills that day.