If Dad were alive now, he would be 105 next Monday. And he would have hated it.

My father was a peaceable man, mild in all things except for his war against ageing. He stopped counting birthdays at 39 and died just short of the 25^th anniversary of his 39^th birthday. And he fought a good fight. For most of his life he had jet black hair and weighed within a pound of 153.

He got a particular kick out of being taken for my brother, even though he was 28 years older than I was.

Old was not a destination that Dad looked forward to. And by today’s standards, it’s not a destination he reached. Two heart attacks in two days took care of that.

I’ve often wondered what he would have said about the time he did have here. It would have depended, I suppose, on what part of it he was talking about.

In some ways Dad lived a life of strange circumstances and near misses. He spent four years in the US Navy and the largest water craft he was on was the Chesapeake ferry. The Navy trained him to be an airplane mechanic, and I would imagine that he was a good one. But then they decided he would make a good tail gunner. When he finished his training and got his orders to go overseas, the war ended, and he got discharged instead. Although he talked about his time in the Navy, he didn’t say whether he liked it or not. That wasn’t really much of a consideration. We were at war. He got drafted. Nobody asked him whether he liked it. That was a lesson he took to a lot of things.

Another big part of his life was sports. Dad was a good athlete. Coach Vann recruited him to play on the Benson High School football team, evidently forgetting that Daddy was no longer a student there. He had to do it in secret since grandmother forbade it. The news got out when Daddy came home with a broken hand. I still haven’t figured out how anybody plays in a football game secretly.  

He played baseball for the Benson Bulls, and I don’t think I ever saw him happier than when he was playing. When he couldn’t play baseball any more, he played softball. And when he couldn’t play softball, he spent most Sundays watching ball games.

Sports was something that made sense to dad. Using skills. Following rules. Accomplishing things. Winning or losing. In his worldview, it was fairly easy to keep score.

And, as with most men, there was the job. Daddy didn’t particularly like his job, but I doubt he ever expected to. It was work. It was a paycheck. It was what a man did, especially one who grew up during the depression. He was an appliance serviceman, and he was good at it; so good that he would occasionally get offers from other Frigidaire dealers who wanted somebody of his skills to head up their service department. Sometimes they offered him significantly more money than he was making, but he would never take the job. That would have meant leaving Benson.

Which was another important part of his life.

People who grow up in small towns with essentially static populations won’t have any trouble understanding the tie he felt to Benson. The family had been there since before the Revolution, and—of the 10 Holmes children—eight of them lived in Benson. His identity was tied as closely to the town as it was to the family—or even the baseball team. There is a literal connection to the past in Benson, and even as old as I am, if I encounter someone older in Benson, I’m Ed Holmes’ boy.

If he were talking about his family, especially my brothers and me, he may have had some difficulty knowing just what to say. It was the opposite of the ordered world of sports. Dad had dreams for his sons: that they would be good athletes and that they would pursue a professional degree that would guarantee a good living. Instead he got athletes who were somewhat less than good, although my brother Pat may have been a seasonal exception. He was, I’m told, a pretty good fullback on the high school football team.

So far as our professional careers are concerned, two of us majored in English and one majored in Art. Daddy just shook his head. I remember a conversation at Thanksgiving dinner one year.

Ray: I just changed my major to sculpture.

Daddy: How do you make a living as a sculptor.

Ray: You don’t.

Even though none of us became engineers, we did learn to make a living. I think he would have been proud of that.

When he was in the Navy, one of his friends said, “You don’t drink. You don’t smoke. You don’t curse. What makes you smell like a man?”

Daddy told that story with no attempt to answer the question. He didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke. And I heard him curse once. Somebody pulled out in front of us on highway 301. Dad swerved to avoid him, and we started doing 360s on a busy highway. We finally came to rest on the shoulder.

He put his head on the steering wheel, and I heard him mutter, “Son of a bitch.” In a very soft voice.

It’s almost Father’s Day, and because Dad’s birthday was always within a few days of Father’s Day, he only got one gift, usually a shirt, for both occasions. It’s sort of a minor league version of being born on Christmas Day. So for this Father’s Day, I’m going to answer the sailor’s question.

For dad, being a man wasn’t a matter of smoking, drinking, or cursing. It wasn’t a matter of hunting, fishing, or fighting. It was far more important than any of that.

It was a matter of honor, of following the rules, accomplishing things, winning when you could and accepting defeat when you had to. It was a matter of doing what you were supposed to do—hold a job, take care of your family, and never bring shame on your family name.

I suppose it’s an archaic definition of manhood, going back to something like chivalry, but it’s an honest definition, dealing with things more important than some of the things we consider “manly” today. And by that definition, he was far more of a man than most.

Happy Father’s Day.