Dear Dad Excerpt IV

Absent but Always Present

 Monica Fountain

M

y father never went on a school field trip. Never came to a football or basketball game where I was shaking my pom-poms in what he still jokingly describes as my little “bobtail skirt.” He didn’t attend the school musical or the play I wrote in high school. When he did come to the school, he usually wasn’t there for me.

Instead, he was helping a single mother get her wayward son back in school. Or he was fighting the local powers that be, protesting to get more black teachers hired for a school enrollment that was increasingly black and a school staff that was stubbornly white. He was often marching off to school board meetings or rallies and organizing the community for another civil fight. Or he was protesting the number of black boys being expelled and suspended—my father’s days and nights filled with meetings and causes and prayer.

My mother was the one who registered me and my brother, Ed, for school. The one who was there for parent-teacher conferences and field trips. She was the one in attendance on Senior Night at football and basketball games, though like my father, she also sometimes stood in as parent for some child at church or one whom she knew from our small-town community. I shared my parents, especially my father. He had scores of son sand daughters, though in actuality my mother gave birth to just two: Ed and me—six years younger. We were PKs, preacher’s kids. My father was pastor of the Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church, the largest African American church in our town of 30,000—and arguably the most influential church.

Dear Dad Excerpt V

Papí

Rosa Maria Santana

M

y dad was a mystery to me. When I was a little girl, he was an intriguing and charming mystery. As I grew older, he became a more perplexing, sometimes painful puzzle. The faded picture of the two of us that I have kept for all these years says as much.

In it, I am three, wearing a red ruffled dress, white socks, and black shiny shoes. My dad kneels next to me, pointing at the camera, trying vainly to get me to pose with him. Instead, I stare at him. Years later, I stare into that grainy snapshot while also searching the pages of my mind over a lifetime of memories for answers to the mystery man and to what caused the picture-perfect daddy and daughter to divide.

Dear Dad Excerpt VI

Never Too Late

Sylvester Monroe

San Francisco (June 2000)

A

s baseball games go, the San Francisco Giants’ 18–0 rout of the Montreal Expos at Pac Bell Park last month was about as good as the national pastime gets. Barry Bonds splashed a homer in the big pond, and even the pitcher hit a grand slam. But as great as the game was, the feats on the field paled in comparison to what went on in the stands. That was the first and only baseball game I have ever been to with my father.

            I grew up believing my father had been lost and presumed killed in the Korean War. When my maternal grandfather wouldn’t let him marry my pregnant mother, a high school senior at the time, the nineteen-year-old prospective father joined the air force and landed in Korea just months after I was born.

Soon after that, my mother also left their Mississippi Delta hometown and headed north to Chicago. For a while, she stayed in touch with my father’s family, but after a time she lost touch with them completely. Except for my mother’s memories, all I had of my father was a 5-by-7 sepia-tone photo of him in his air force uniform and another snapshot of him in his high school football jersey, No. 33. I wore that number during my own short-lived high school football career.

Call of a Lifetime

            I was a twenty-two-year-old cub reporter at Newsweek magazine in Boston when, out of the blue, I got an amazing telephone call from my mother in Chicago. “Are you sitting down?” she began.

“I just ran into your father’s sister. She says he is alive and living in Northern California. He’s been there for the last twenty-some years. Tried to find us, but didn’t know where we were.”

            It is difficult to describe what I felt at that moment. I did not whoop and holler. I did not cry. I did not do or think anything. I simply tried to comprehend the true meaning of the revelation: Your father is alive. It wasn’t easy.

Dear Dad Contents

About the Book

Prologue

Reflections

An Open Letter to a Father: Dear Dad 

John W. Fountain 

3

Dad’s Lesson: Life Is About Now, Not Then 

Donald A. Hayner

6

The Truth at Last 

Nichole M. Christian

9

Cutting My Son’s Hair: A Priceless, Intimate Moment 

John W. Fountain

14

Through a Picture Window 

Stephanie Gadlin

17

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Dear Dad About the Book & Prologue

About the Book

This project was inspired by my essay for National Public Radio’s This I Believe series and is itself a compilation of true narratives written by a group of journalists and writers I assembled for this project. Men and women from various walks of life and various generations, they are black, white, and Hispanic. A good number of them have written for some of the nation’s best news organizations—the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Time magazine, and others. All of them write in the pages that follow about the impact of fathers, and fatherlessness, on their own lives. This comes at a time when the focus of a national initiative and even President Barack Obama have sounded the clarion call for responsible fatherhood amid a continuing crisis of paternal absenteeism.

Fatherhood is a subject that deserves our attention. A key component of that critical socializing agent known as family, “father” is important to us all.