Quirks and smiles on Father’s Day 

When I was growing up, there was something about my father that I found wildly amusing. I would ask him a question about a familiar object – something in our home, perhaps, or an item of clothing – and eagerly await his response.  One day, I asked him to name the color of our car. I could see him thinking, searching his mind … and then came the response: “Dark?”  He was the consummate absentminded professor. At dinner he could expound upon the relationship between Judaism and Islam or about the rise of anti-Semitism. But ask him to name the vegetables on his plate, and he was clueless.  

His inability to connect to the basic physical plane of life was not the result of intellectual limitation; on the contrary, my father had a law degree, semikhah (Rabbinic ordination) and a Ph.D. in Hebrew and Jewish Education.  

Fortunately my dad was good-natured about his absentmindedness and did not mind being teased. Therefore, on Father’s Day each year, I usually ended up making him something to help him get along in the “real” world. One year I made him a picture book of … yes, labeled vegetables. My testing him at dinner became a game that my mother and I found hilarious. I couldn’t fathom how he could retain the minutia needed for his work, but “cucumber” could just not make it into his vocabulary.  

Father’s Day was a time to celebrate his uniqueness as well as his role, and therefore my father’s quirks became a critical part of the day. For this same reason on Father’s Day in my own family, it was the quirk-related gift for my husband that elicited laughter, joy and closeness.

Those memories, which connect to feelings in ways that generic gifts may not, last a lifetime.  Needless to say, the focus of the gift should celebrate uniqueness, not shine a light on a sensitive issue. And it’s not hard to create a gift that shows that you truly know the dad you’re celebrating; think of something endearing about the guy that he laughs about too, and make the most of it.

In the early 1970s, my father’s attention was focused on the plight of the Soviet Jews and other matters Jewish, not the hippies and the various new ways of rebelling that were becoming commonplace. Therefore when he left our apartment building one morning and saw hundreds of college students “streaking,” he ran back into the building and used the lobby phone to call my mother upstairs. “Estelle! They’re running naked in the streets!” I regret that I never made that quote into a Father’s Day T-shirt. Then again, that memory lasted well on its own. Nearly 20 years after celebrating my last Father’s Day with him, it still makes me laugh.

SHELLEY KATSH, LICSW, is the social worker at Adoption Options, the adoption program of Jewish Family Service.