Tag: Father’s Day in Rangeley

A day for Dada cookers, homemade Hallmarks, and lakeside legends

Joy CloughLeave a comment

Today is Father’s Day and the first day of summer, or so says the calendar. Our Rangeley weather, on the other hand, just isn’t buying it. With every downpour, it says “Go hug Dad. Don’t wait to tell him how special he is. ‘Cause the whole summer thing catching up with the calendar so you can celebrate without Gore-Tex and goulashes? Yeah….you’re gonna wait for that.”

Oh we saw the sunshine, remember? We let it lure us outside to flock to the Lupine Festival, line up at the Pine Tree Frosty and launch onto the lakes and ponds. But that was yesterday.

Today reminds me of the days I’d wash soggy PB&J sandwiches down with tepid Tang and hope I’d catch a fish before the rain found its way inside my slicker. I’d buck it up to be with Dad. And if he were still here, I’d be sitting in a boat cushion puddle next to him until he out-fished me and we could call it “a good day.” Instead, I’m watching the rain rile up the lake from my warm, dry seat by the window. I’m happy that my best Father’s Days are still rooted in Rangeley, that more love and laughter with Tom and our daughters is yet to come—certain as the promise of finally, full-blown summer. I’m glad we passed down our fathers’ out-on-the-lake legacy to Helen and Becky, and I know the girls agree. Plus, I’m pretty sure they’re tickled that their dad doesn’t make them wash PB&Js down with Tang like their Grandpa did—and that he uses a watch and the position of the sun, weather permitting, rather than a running trout tally to tell him the day is complete.

“When the girls call, tell them I love them and I’m having a good Father’s Day,” Tom said this afternoon. He was headed up to Aziscohos to fish in the rain for a couple days with other guy friends who’d join in as soon as their cookouts and other dad celebrations were finished. As usual, he’d be out of cell phone range because, even if he carried one, there’d be no transmission towers for miles.

“They know,” I said. They couldn’t come “up” today to wet a line in person. But even though Helen is back in Boston and Becky is camping in California, I’m pretty sure a good part of each of them is right next to their Dad, sitting in their little girl rain slickers, waiting to reel in and squeal with delight.

For more about “Dada cookers,” homemade Hallmark moments and man-of-the-house heroics, see:

Daddy’s grown-up girl
Dads of daughters
From Daddy’s little girl
Dining with Dad

Daddy’s grown-up girl

Joy Clough5 Comments

Whenever I met someone throughout Maine, New Hampshire, and either end of Massachusetts, I’d have to tell Mac. Besides inheriting his passion for story telling to anyone who’d stand still long enough to listen, I believed nothing ever really happened until it got reported back to Mac. And each and every time I did so, he’d puff out his chest like a partridge ready to drum and ask: “Did you tell ’em who you are?”

“Yes,” I’d say in all honesty. “I told ’em who I was.”

I wasn’t Joy McGranahan like it said on my birth records. I wasn’t Mrs. Thomas Clough, even after I took vows, signed a marriage certificate, and had that stamped on my first credit card back when Sears thought women couldn’t be held responsible for their purchases until they had a husband. Even later, when I became full-fledged Joy Clough—writer, mother, successful business proprietor, and wife to a Science Teacher of the Year—that still wasn’t who I was.

“Hi, I’m Joy, Mac’s daughter.” That’s how I came to introduce myself. It paved my way, opened doors, and usually sparked instantaneous recognition. On the rare occasion I’d run across someone who couldn’t readily remember hearing or seeing Mac, I’d have to coax out a recollection. “You know, ‘Mac’ McGranahan? Writes the outdoor column for the paper? Talks about fishing on the local cable channel? Talks about pretty much anything anywhere, but fishing stories and Maine jokes are his claim to fame. Red and black flannel shirt, suspenders…?”

“Oh, yeah, I know Mac!” most folks eventually responded. “He’s your Dad?” They’d shake my hand, assessing the mild-mannered woman who seemed to be holding her own in the shadow of such a character, retell their favorite outdoors with Mac story, and wish us all the best.

There was a time, of course, when I was just Joy, or Joy Joy as he called me when we were being silly, which was most of the time. Back before I called him by his nickname, before I ventured into society on my own, he was just Daddy. I had no relativity, no separation, no real knowledge of my own identity, and no words to label the love and security I saw in the faces of my father and mother as they reached down to hold me, lift me up. For the longest time I figured everybody’s daddy smelled faintly of boat exhaust, took their families to big lakes in Maine named after moose, and played practical jokes on raccoons. I had no clue that some moms weren’t OK having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Tang for supper so they could stay on the water till dark, or that, when company came over, some cared if their hamburgers weren’t made out of cow meat.

“Daddy, do you think God is up there?” I asked as we trolled around Moosehead Lake at dusk. Mac looked up with me at the last rays of sun turning the clouds cotton candy pink and, for the first time I can remember, could not pretend to be sure of an answer. “If He is, what do you suppose He looks like?” he asked back. From where I sat watching him steer the boat, silhouetted by lake and sky, I imagined an older, white-bearded guy kind of like him. Able to move mountains when he had to, and stop you in your tracks with his big, booming voice.

“Hey Joy Joy, come see how strong your Daddy is,” Mac would holler. Holding one arm at a right angle, he’d thrust his fist up in the air and I’d grip onto his bicep for all I was worth until he’d flex a grapefruit-sized ball of muscle, heaving my hands out of its way. Then he’d hoist me to the ceiling on one hand, bragging I was lighter than the boat anchor he had to horse back into the boat all the time, and spin me around the room till we were both giggling.

As I grew, so too did my perspective, slowly expanding my universe out and around the man at its center. Who I was evolved from Daddy’s littlest fishing buddy, to his Twist and Shout dance partner, to the young writer whose first stories he published on the Xerox machine in his office and hand-delivered to captive readers. When I graduated from “the little blonde girl who asks too many questions” to scoring my first newspaper byline, he proclaimed: “My daughter can do anything she puts her mind to.” I grew to believe it, too, especially if Mac gave me a big shove in the right direction.

Born near Boston on “the real” Memorial Day in 1928, the son of a tug boat captain and a Scottish immigrant, my Dad’s given name was Warren. But no one ever called him that except his parents and sister who, by nature and necessity, were quiet, temperate people. “I never figured out how he got the way he is,” my Nana, his mother, would tell me. “Up until the time he was three, I could just sit him out in the yard in an old tire inner tube and he’d stay put for hours, afraid to crawl out of it, not a peep out of him. How’d he grow up to think the sun has to rise and set over him? Maybe I should’ve let him have his own room instead of making him sleep on the divan all those years.”

No matter what spawned it, Mac had an ego the size of the biggest bull moose in the herd. Like the huge ol’ christer you see standing in the road and pray he goes around your car and not charging into it. He was always right. Period. And if you tried to sway him toward your way of thinking, he’d wear you down till you’d not only see his point of view, but tell him you were wrong not believing him in the first place. We usually didn’t mind, though, because he’d make everything into a joke, getting us to laugh, at ourselves, at him and the wonder of his all-knowingness. “Good thing I moved us back up here from Massachusetts when I did,” he said. “How else would you have met your future husband, gotten a job, bought a house, had kids? And good thing I keep such a nice boat down on Great Bay. Gave Tom all the more incentive to marry you and take you off my hands!” Yup, Mac, I’d say to myself, becoming your fishing pal was the trump card, way more alluring than my looks or personality! I’m sure what Tom really wanted, God help him, was to be able to tell people he was Mac’s son-in-law.

Technically, of course, he was right. Mac was half the reason I was born in the first place, the perfect complement to my mother, who knew when to stand her ground and when to bend, who matched him joke for joke and, sometimes, fish for fish. If not for his paternal influence, I might never have visited places like Rangeley, never have grown up dreaming of a guy who wanted to live with me in a cabin on a lake, never had Mr. Right waiting for me by the altar while Mac gave me his blessing.

“Smile at everyone as you pass by,” he said, waiting to walk me down the aisle on my wedding day. “You’re beautiful, and every single one of these people is here just for you.” Well, probably some of them are here to see Tom, too, I remember thinking. But I didn’t want to argue, so I rested my hand on Mac’s arm, feeling his bicep tighten under his tux, and went side-by-side with him toward my future.

“Wow, I’m pretty lucky to have a daughter with a place in Rangeley who thinks enough of her father to surprise him with a cake,” Mac told me years later after one of his New England Outdoor Writers’ annual dinners was hosted here. “Everybody realized it was my birthday and they all sang to me!”

“Yup, I told ’em who I was at the Rangeley Inn and they baked it up special,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure they had a Memorial Day parade for you in town, too.” It was the best Mac celebration ever, perfect indeed. He got to eat cake, preside over his fellow writers, and brag about how his daughter “put her mind to it” and got herself a cabin right down the lake from where he’d caught the best brookies.

“How am I ever going to top that one?” I wondered. “I really helped him toot his horn big time.” Good thing, too. A year later, Mac died in the L.L. Bean wing at Maine Medical, just after I turned 40, and mere days after he’d thrown his canoe on top of his Jeep for the last time. When he retired early ten years before, we teased him that he’d fish himself to death. He made a valiant effort but, truth was, he wasn’t a force of nature. Heart disease, his preference for Snickers and Hostess snacks and, I believe, his unyielding approach to life, caught up with him.

Mac’s a lot quieter now, and a much better listener. But I still hear him right around sunset out on the dock talking back to the loons. Once in a great while, when I get to introduce myself the way he taught me, I can almost see him grin and puff out his chest. But best of all, over the years I’ve come to know that the distinction he craved, the recognition of me being Mac’s daughter, was his honor as much as mine. Who I am, who I’ve become as an older woman, is a calmer, gentler, female version of my father with the same warped sense of humor, same need to talk a blue streak, same determination for living life to the fullest where I can see God in the open sky. “My daughter’s just like her Old Man,” he’d brag at social gatherings. And, although I couldn’t agree at the time, didn’t see it till much later, I now accept the claim as mostly true. Minus the red and black flannel shirt with Snickers in every pocket and, most days, drowning out the loon calls, Mac was right.

Happy Father’s Day!

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For more Father’s Day stories, see:

Dads of daughters
From Daddy’s little girl
Dining with Dad

For more “Rooted In Moosehead, too” stories, see:

Dads of daughters

Joy Clough3 Comments

It was a Sunday in mid-June when we had to summon my Dad to dislodge a mouse that had been trapped inside the drain in the laundry room sink since early spring. My mother, my sister, and I were standing at the top of the cellar stairs cringing when he finally came up. He lumbered past us with a coffee can bound for somewhere way out back.

“Why am I the one who gets to do these kinds of things?” he asked, flailing the can in our faces. “Just because I’m the only guy in the house? Cause I’m the father around here?”

Ummm….yeah….we all said silently. Dad (AKA Mac) was responsible for plumbing, pest control, and safeguarding the house from intruders. The waylaid mouse met all of those criteria.

I grew up in a one-male household. And, after marriage and two daughters, that status pretty much stuck. No brother tinkering with a truck in the driveway. No son to shatter my theories about the uniqueness of father-daughter relationships. Just Dad, our one-man magic show. Please bear this in mind as you read the following theories. Please also know that my theories took root in the early ’60s when it was expected for females to keep their distance and say things like “Eeeek!”—and socially acceptable for Dads to declare stuff “too messy for girls.” Mine always swore he didn’t miss having a son. But I bet on certain occasions, especially that morning in June with the putrid coffee can, he instantly became a secret liar. If only he’d had a male dependent at the top of the stairs, Mac could have emerged from the cellar with his heart full of gratitude, but his hands empty. “Son, go find yourself a coffee can,” he would’ve said. “There’s a project for you down there.” And the imaginary son of the early ’60s would obey, trying to keep a stiff upper lip and a strong stomach, knowing the chore was ultimately preparing him for manhood—for the day when he’d take a wife and the responsibility for any yucky stuff trapped in his terrain.

When it comes to heroes, a Dad of daughters might as well have a cape and a lightening bolt emblazoned on his chest. Faced with danger and all manner of distasteful duties, he responds, undaunted by extension ladders or jumper cables, by navigating through whitecaps, or even by investigating nighttime noises.

“Yup, it’s a bear,” Mac affirmed. It was a June night back in 1964 and he was peering into the darkness from our tiny log cabin on Moosehead Lake. My sister and I had finally nagged him into determining the source of sounds coming from the front porch. We’d listened long enough from our beds right under the windows to know that, whatever it was, it was much bigger than the raccoon visitors of previous nights. And then we yelled for backup. “Daaaaaad!!!”

In years since, we realized there was nothing even Mac could have done—except maybe spray the bear in the face with the fire extinguisher if it got rambunctious enough to shove the door open. Still, there was something about our Daddy standing in his undershorts stating the obvious that we found comforting.

“Yup,” he said, “and it’s a big bear, too.” After watching it amble away in the dark, he shuffled back to bed himself, grumpy but gratified. Because the only thing Mac was afraid of was not being the rock hard center of our universe. And that was bigger and hairier than any old Maine black bear.

It wasn’t long after I began to watch my husband Tom’s interactions with my own young girls that I discovered it’s not necessarily bravado that stirs Dads of daughters to action. It’s the call: “Daaaaad...” It sounds like a sheep with a bad stomach ache, but little girls have it mastered by age two. And much the same way a dog responds to a high-pitched whistle even though he doesn’t know why, a Dad comes. Instinctively he snatches up a toolbox, a wad of paper towel and/or a plunger along the way, knowing that, whatever it is, if it’s broken, clogged or invasive, it’s his job. From Barbies to bike chains—to those hopelessly gnarled up necklace knots he can somehow unravel with his big, burly fingers—if Dad can’t fix it, it’s history. And if he really isn’t keen on squishing, trapping, or otherwise keeping creepy stuff away from his womenfolk, he has to buck up and do it anyway.

“Daaaaddy! Keep these bees off my peanut butter and jelly!” my first-born Helen yelled from her picnic log down by the lake. She was about three, and Tom had already plucked her out of the Salmon Falls River, showed her the bears at the Seboomook dump, and desensitized her to mice so successfully that she was catching them in a minnow trap and rolling it back and forth across the cabin floor like her own animated Fisher Price toy. She was a new-age girl child, born to a Dad who stood there right in the delivery room waiting for her to show up, even though part of him wanted to be out in the waiting room with his forefathers. She and I had the best of both worlds, an ’80s “girls can do anything” male role model who still had enough Maine woods machismo to build a cabin around us and shield us from vermin.  On that particular outing, a nest of yellow jackets swarming our picnic was his call to action—one he definitely did not want to answer.

“Come with Daddy, Helen, we’re going inside now!” Tom commanded. His voice was uncharacteristically shaky and, by the time he’d shoved sandwiches back into baggies and retreated, his face was a non-summery shade of pale. I handed him the big can of Raid we kept for just such circumstances, knowing that its super long spray wand would not keep Tom far enough away from bees—his greatest, and pretty much only, fear.

“Daddy got stung really bad when he was about your age while he was playing down by the water at his camp,” Tom told Helen after she’d watched him do his little extermination dance from a safe distance. “But those naughty bees won’t bother you any more, honey. Daddy got ’em!”

By the summer she turned four, Helen was Tom’s fearless little fishing side-kick and a brave big sister in training. “Look, Daddy, a snake!” she said, pointing matter-of-factly to a place on the dock where I spent hours each afternoon, plopped into a beach chair in my lamp shade of a bathing suit, reading and letting soon-to-be-born Becky kick me like a soccer ball. Had I ever seen a snake anywhere near my spot, I’m pretty sure Becky would have been a preemie.

“Don’t tell your Mom,” Tom said to his little comrade.

Then, somewhere along the way when I wasn’t paying attention, my daughters turned from gutsy little girls into bodacious women of the new millennium. “Better than boys,” I’d tell them, because they shooed snakes out of my path and changed their own tires, but still had all-day pajama days with me. All that plus, well, because they were girls. We were having such a discussion on a recent vacation, just the three of us sitting in a rustic cabana, staring out over bluer, warmer water and enjoying our favorite grown-up picnic cocktails, when Becky noticed something burrowing into the sand underneath where Tom was coming to eat his lunch.

“Hmm, looks like they’re ground hornets,” she said.

“Sssh!” I said. “Don’t tell your Dad.”

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For more Father’s Day sentiments, see:

From Daddy’s little girl

Joy Clough3 Comments

(Author’s Note:  The following is from my writing archives (circa 1988). I post it in honor of my stashed-away memories—of my dad, of spending my best Father’s Days in Rangeley—and, especially, of Helen and Becky and their awesome fishing/adventure buddy, Tom.)

Dear Dad:

Mom said I should make you a special Father’s Day card ’cause I’m such a good drawer. Plus I’m the big sister and little Becky can’t really hold onto a crayon yet, never mind write big girl words. Mom used to let me just point at cards in the store and then she’d buy whichever one sounded pretty good, but she doesn’t let me do that since I won that Mother’s Day card contest at Hannaford. Now I gotta send my very best to everyone.

I did sneak a peak at the store cards, though—the ones Mom says tons of dads would be opening up all across America the same time as you. Know what? Mom was right. None of ’em were really for you, Dad. They all had pictures of golf clubs or cartoon puppies holding up hearts or just “Father” in gold, squiggly letters. I only found one that showed a guy on a pond early in the morning but there wasn’t one trout rising, so that wasn’t any good, either! After all, Father’s Day is for fishin’ with your dad, right? Why else would it be on a Sunday in June?

So I started drawing some fish to decorate your card, but they sort of looked like hot dog buns with wings. Then I got a better idea. Remember how Wheaties stopped putting pictures of basketball players—and that little Mary Lou something or other from the Olympics who was kind of like Minnie Mouse in a leotard—on their cereal boxes?Remember how they just left a white place on the front and everyone was supposed to draw in their own faces? Well, we have a box that Mom’s been trying to make me eat ever since I begged for it in the store. She says it’s the breakfast of champions. I asked her if a champion was somebody who liked old flaky stuff with no sugar on it. She said: “No, it’s someone who plays a sport better than anybody else. Now eat up or you’ll be late for school.” So Dad, I drew you in the face on the box, with your fishin’ hat and your pole, and that silly grin you get when you pull in a lunker. It came out real nice and I was gonna cut it out for you. But then Mom hollered ’cause I’d been sitting there in my pajamas drawing for a really long time, and she grabbed the box and stuffed it back in the cupboard. That’s O.K., though, ’cause we should finish the Wheaties before I cut the box open, and you’ll probably need some this weekend to give you big muscles for turning that huge crank on your boat trailer. I betcha Michael Jordan can’t pull a boat right up out of water like that!

Mom says I’m pretty lucky you take me fishin’ all the time cause lots of dads go off by themselves instead. Wouldn’t that be kinda boring though? You wouldn’t have anybody to talk to just floating around all day alone. And who’d share their cheese curls with you and get your beers out of the cooler and tell you knock-knock jokes?

Thanks, Dad, for being my fishin’ pal. You’re the nicest guy in the whole world. Someday I hope you buy me one of those vests with the tiny pockets all over it just like yours ’cause I bet I could fit about 20 hundred mini Snickers in there and I’d never hafta go in for supper. Maybe when I’m seven or eight, O.K.? Boy, when I was four, I didn’t even know how to get the line to come off the fishin’ pole out into the water without making a helluva mess, remember? Now look at me, I can do it so good that my hook goes to the very bottom, right down in the rocks and weeds, and stays there. Maybe next summer you’ll let me push all those neat buttons on your boat. Like on that beeping box in front of your seat you said helps us find fish, and that giant up and down humming reel off the back of the boat you’re always playing with to catch ’em once you find ’em. How do they work…sort of like magic? If I push the buttons, too, maybe we’ll really find some fish!

You show me lots of things when we’re out fishin’, like how important it is not to talk to people we’ve never seen before. It was a good thing you didn’t answer that man over at Quimby Pond when he asked you what you were catchin’ all your trout with. You acted like you didn’t even hear him, which was very smart ’cause he was a stranger.

I want you to have the best Father’s Day ever, Dad. Maybe we could take the canoe down the Salmon Falls River to that cove where I went swimming once by accident. It was all mucky and weedy and you said pickerel like that kinda stuff. Too bad Mom didn’t. Or maybe we’ll try Winnipesaukee. I like it there ’cause it’s fun to watch all those boats racing around. Mom calls ’em “fancy assed” because they’re way sparklier than our boat and must remind her of the time I dumped glitter all over the kitchen floor. Do you think Don Johnson is a bass fisherman? I’m pretty sure I saw him go by last time we were out. Boy, I bet his kid was having a blast!

No matter where we go, I don’t want you to sit and worry about work and whatever it is you do there. And I sure hope we can find a spot where there’s not too much wind, where the water’s not too warm or too cold, and where there’s lots and lots of fish biting all around our boat. That’s what I’m wishing for you on Father’s Day, Dad, ’cause you sure deserve it.

Your daughter,

Helen

Dining with Dad

Joy Clough3 Comments

When she was just beginning to link objects with labels and functions, one of my girls picked a spatula up off the kitchen counter and declared it a “Dada cooker.” Ever since, I’ve been fascinated with the role of father in the modern kitchen.

Traditionally, men were not linked to any food prep functions. When they did take utensils in hand, it was to “carve” the roast—a ceremonial ritual dating back to when the head of the household had brought the meat to the table an hour earlier from yonder woods or field. Plus, fathers have also always been pretty deft with barbecue implements, a ritual which dates back even earlier to primordial families who never bothered to specify “rare” or “well done.”

In taking their culinary tools closer and closer to the kitchen stove, men seem to have developed extraordinary skill with the common spatula. Originally, I believe that
dexterity was born of necessity and fine-tuned during all-male fishing trips when there was nothing between them, their hunger and the supper still flopping around in the sink, but an iron skillet and plenty of bacon grease.

“Daddy’s cooking supper?” my sister and I would ask on the occasions my mother could not be home to feed us.

“Yes. I told him to heat up some corn chowder.”

When the time came, we watched in silent amazement tinged with trepidation. Had it been our Mum at the stove, we would have questioned the use of cast iron cookery, and said “yuck” when the Worcester Sauce was added. But, when Daddy did it, we kept still. Even if we had to watch him eat most of the chowder himself and load up on crackers afterwards, paternal cooking was an exciting shift from the ordinary.

It’s no wonder my daughters readily associated the spatula with their dad. Especially on camp weekends, he became so proficient in the short order cooking department the frying pan barely cooled between Saturday morning and Sunday evening. And, like most  dads, he never told them “You just ate,” or “You should have some fruit instead.” He was more than willing to take command of any operation resulting in food, especially grilled cheese sandwich construction for his little fishing buddies on a Saturday afternoon.

Dads don’t generally waste as much energy as moms worrying about the four food groups, either. To them, food is fuel. And the object is to tank up—preferably without forks and, ideally, without plates—so you can return to what you were doing when hunger struck.

“We made sandwiches with Dad for lunch,” I remember Helen announcing as I’d return home from running errands when she and her sister were small.

I could tell. A knife still stood buried in the peanut butter jar in the middle of the table kitchen table. Surrounding it were all the signs of a motherless feeding frenzy—paper towels, crumbs and huge hunks of cast off crusts.

“Did you have anything to drink?” I’d ask. (I’d learned that dads making dinner got so intent on the dietary bulk of the meal that they’d usually forget the liquid part.)

“Oh, yes,” said Helen. “Red Kool Aid. But we spilled some and Dad wiped it all up so the floors wouldn’t be sticky.”

I could tell. My oak Lazy Susan was glued to the table top and I could see a mound of pink stained paper towels heaped into the wastebasket. “Don’t say anything to your Mom,” he must have instructed as he unraveled a long, billowing expanse off the towel holder at the other side of the room. The sponge next to the sink, however, was dry as a bone.

I always figured this behavior dated back to the time when a guy’s bandana had to suffice for a cleaning cloth and his water was rationed from a canteen. Or, maybe it was the natural result of too many boyhood confrontations with a mom who didn’t understand there was no time to tidy up your trail when the Injuns were after you. Most likely, it stems from a little bit of both. I do know that, somewhere along the line, dads came to rely on “dry” cleaning to cope with spills and splatters.

I had to remind myself that this very same cavalier kitchen attitude had been adding spice and excitement to father-child relationships, mine included, since the first time a woman walked away from her hearth for any amount of time. I’d bite my tongue, wet the sponge, and remember my dad’s special corn chowder out of a can. And I’d especially think of Grandpa.

It was a rare and festive occasion when my grandma would drive off alone to go shopping, and my grandpa would let us take full advantage. (For those of you who read about her in Letting Myself Stay, I’m not talking about my mild-mannered Nana who’d offer us dessert all the time because she thought we were company and she’d probably just served us a meal but couldn’t really remember. This was my other, omnipresent grandma, who once told me she liked to dust. She policed her cookie supply and seemed to think the earth would spin off its axis if you ate more than two a day or, Heaven forbid, consumed your food groups in the wrong order.)

“Is she gone yet?” my grandpa would wonder with boyish impatience as my sister and I watched the big, blue Ford back down the driveway. We’d wait until she was safely on her way and then race into the kitchen straight for the cookie jar.

“Don’t tell your grandmother!” Grandpa always reminded us with a devilish smile as he scooped most of the crumbs into a napkin and double-checked us for Oreo moustaches.

Happy Father’s Day, everyone! May you dine with your dad in your heart and at your table.