Happy Father's Day

1986, a cold February night at a party. A man meets up with a woman who has organic brain dysfunction due to head injury and they have a night neither of them will soon forget. By all accounts he was goofy. Curly haired. Wore glasses. Affable, whimsical. She runs off with him, then he vanishes. I suppose, add "unreliable" to that list.

There's an old photograph somewhere in my house. Dated February, 1986. It's faded, with some yellowing.

2011, I hold my first son for the first time. His mother can't nurse him that night because of a botched epidural, and I go down to the NICU and feed him all night through a tube. When we go home with him, I lay awake staring at him in the dim light while he sleeps in a pack-and-play at the foot of our bed.

In the early 1990s my step-grandpa bounces me on his knee and I tug at his beard. There is a painting of him gardening with my older cousin, and stories of him teaching my uncle what he knows of cars. He's an auto mechanic who owned his own garage, a welder, a woodworker, a gardener. A crafter. The ultimate learner, and even something of a computer nerd. He drew pictures on the floppy discs of my Apple Macintosh, so I could play my games before I knew how to read. But I never learned his trades. Years later, I asked him if he could teach me to change my own oil, and he told me he thought my aptitude was for computers, but that "some people just don't have the aptitude for cars."

The photograph is in a box. It had been packed away for our recent move, and I haven't unpacked it yet. I may not bother.

2012, I'm laying on the floor of the nursery. It had previously been an office I had purposed for all my stuff, jammed into one space, but was now a brown and green jungle. My firstborn is propping himself up on one of his toys and looks over at me, lets go, and takes three steps and falls on top of my chest. His first steps.

2003, I started my first job, and found my first mentor. John Street, the twenty-five-lifer Lead Server at a local burger joint with a nice river view. He walked with a limp and used all the same jokes and catch phrases he'd been using for years. He knew everyone and took everyone he knew, whether it was your turn or not. He made you believe you were working for it but, really, he was supporting a family on the income of a low-tip restaurant. They called me "John Jr." and he taught me to work hard, and work sheisty. He told me if I ever have a kid to put him in church, even if I don't believe in it. He would go out for a beer on his break and shoot the breeze about the Cubs.

That box is stuffed with old clothes and some other odds and ends. Just another hastily packed artifact of our escape. Most things were organized but that one went to the disorganized menagerie from the end of the packing phase.

In 2014, I said goodbye to living with my son. I moved back in with my grandmother, and visitation prior to any court orders was subject to whimsy and emotion and my ability to pay overpriced child support. When he fell asleep in bed with me in my bedroom, I cried silently every night. The music we listened to at that time still haunts me with the memory of the fears I felt.

In roughly 2006 and 2007, some family tragedies happened that began to tear my parent-grandparent generation apart. My uncle and my biological grandpa were on a stark side in contrast to my grandma and step-grandpa, and I chose them for a while. They were cut of the same cloth – macho intellectual atheists, with wild philosophy combinations that married their own brands of misogyny and old world intellectual snark.

Before we moved, the photo had been in another box. There was a flood in the basement, and it was found stuck to a few other pictures of the same sort. It's the only one that survived.

July, 2016, I had my second son. I had been starting a new job and was already always exhausted. I did my best to stick around, but was generally torn from him by my job. We brought him home and my wife couldn't handle being alone so we stayed at my mother-in-law's, so there we slept with him in a snuggle nest – a little cradle that fits right in your bed. I woke up ten times a night to hit the lullaby button and rub his back til he slept.

In 2007 a man entered the diner grey-haired and boisterous. He sat in my section and drank coffee and we talked until long after I was off the clock, long into the later hours of the morning. He came back subsequent weeks and I met a couple of his friends, and we formed a great friendship. He let me in on a restaurant project he was on the ground floor of, with a few of his buds in the industry, and I left my first job to go work at an up-and-coming five restaurant multi-concept in one building. My second mentor, and one of my greatest influences. He could stay awake for hours and talk to you about everything and you could learn nothing of him. He could disappear into the night and reappear days later with some story to tell. He wore several coats like he was homeless, yet he always had a place to stay. He seemed to have an anecdote and an explanation and an understanding of everything that could have happened in the restaurant industry, and he seemed to have been everywhere. He may even have been a published author at one point. To this day, I know next to nothing about his true past.

The photograph had been handed to me by my grandma. At the time she found it, my wife and I had been living with her and my step-grandpa, before our first son. Their animosity toward her had driven us to leave in a fury one night, and she "found" a photograph that seemed to make me feel loyalty toward her again. A step of cold manipulation, if I've never seen one.

Almost six months ago, our youngest son, Roran, took his first steps. My older son Wesley had become fast friends with him. He was all he talked about. They followed each other around and he spent all his energy during visitations trying to show things to Baby Brother. Roran was standing on his own and, Wesley sitting feet away, took a step toward him then fell down. Later, he got up and took another one. Wesley was ecstatic, laughing and cheering and trying to get him to do it again. His young age and innocence saved him from understanding how crushing it is that he had to wait two weeks to see it again, and by then Roran was walking full tilt – Wesley missed all the learning stage, but he didn't care. I was just happy they loved each other so much.

Now. My father-in-law calls me "son" in that jocular way, but I know he tries to mean it. The man who uses women, the man who whispers misogyny to his son. The man who provides the example I try to avoid.

I'm told my hair is particularly curly. I'm goofy. I wear glasses. I'm affable, and whimsical. The photograph is of my father.

Weeks before Father's Day, we moved into our new house. We haven't unpacked it all, but my youngest son loves it. Yesterday, days before Father's Day, my oldest saw it for the first time. He can't stop running around in it and talking about how great it is. On my desk is five lists of things we need to do and take care of, including finances. Today I laid my head on his tiny chest and told him I felt dizzy, and he said he "okay" and hugged me back. My son knows my strange secrets and my idiosyncrasies like I never knew any of the men in my life. The photograph is of my father, and I don't think I'll ever bother retrieving it from the flood damaged box, somewhere in my house. So many men are unreachable. Mysterious. So many fathers unknowable. I'll never add those words to my list. And I'll never be unreliable to my children.