When men tell men they're becoming fathers

I was privileged to take part in a sacred ceremony last night. Matt told me he and his wife are having a baby. Their first.

I was the first person outside of his parents he’d told.

He’s a former student of mine and it’s fair to say I’m a sort of mentor to him. He tells me he’d like to be just like me.

And he’s not at all referring to frequent episodes of drunken revelry, ample hammock time and an apparent ability to skate through life with no visible means of support.

He wants to be a writer like me.

I have trouble wrapping my head around that ambition. He’d heard me for 13 weeks nearly two years ago profess what a failure I consider my career.

I’ve written for many prominent magazines -- once or twice. I wake up nearly every night troubled by my inability to earn money. The stack of rejection letters my most cherished book projects have drawn are now thicker than the books themselves.

I’m flattered he thinks I’m such a great writer because he, indeed, is a great writer. He’s already written many important stories for prestigious magazines.

So he may never write like me.

To write like me, I tell him, you need to become seasoned by decades of failure.

I think what he admires most about me, and this is admirable, is I’ll never quit.

We get together for beers in Pittsburgh maybe once every six months or so to talk career. He gives me bona fide contacts to top magazines he’s sure will be interested in running my stories and I tell him about my latest career humiliation.

When I say what he told me is sacred, I mean that. It happens in a bar, not a church. It is consecrated not with sacramental wines, but with intoxicating spirits.

It’s not the kind of thing you tell your buddies right away. I don’t know any guys that run out in the street to scream their wives are having a baby -- not unless they want to get run over by a bus.

You don’t want to tell a common moron who’ll blurt out, “Man, is your life going to change!”

I heard that so often I reflexively began responding, “Well, that’s good, because up ‘til now it has really, really sucked!”

You want to tell someone who appears reassuring that fatherhood isn’t going to lay devastation to your happy young life.

I had to go clear to Florida to find my guy. I was there doing a story about the carnival industry.

He was a perfect stranger and one of the reasons I’ll always sit next to strangers in bars I’ve never been to.

He was a big guy, kind of quiet, but looked capable of making a lot of noise if things got rough.

We hardly said a word to one another for an hour. We just sat there sipping beer and watching the baseball game.

Then it became a guy’s version of speed dating: Where you from? What do you do? You golf? My grass needs cut. The bartenders are all cool here. Yeah, I hate the Red Sox, too.

He smiled sunshine when he mentioned he had two little girls. About an hour later we were new best friends and I said, you know, you’re the first guy I’ve told but I found out last week I’m going to be a dad.

It was like I blasted him with happy lightning.

He told me the moment I held my new child would be the happiest day of my life and every day would get better after that. He told me bedtime stories would become the highlight of my day. He told me nothing I achieved in my career would make me as happy as waking up every day knowing I am a father.

And he told me a lie.

He said he was a landscaper.

He was a prophet.

I said goodbye to Matt and said a parking lot prayer he achieves all his ambitions and becomes just like me.

A happy man who happens to write.

Why Father's Day always makes me blue

I’m not sure why Father’s Day always makes me blue.

A writer’s website asked me to compose a short piece about Father’s Day. I know I’m destined to disappoint them.

I think they’d like me to write a literary cheerleader about how much I love the day when I can bask in the affections of my daughters and how that one day keystones the central role of my existence.

I just can’t do it.

It’s odd, I know, because I egotistically believe I am the world’s most exuberant father. As evidentiary proof, I offer my sorry bank account.

It’s impossible to calculate how far behind I am professionally because of the two tiny time bandits for whom I am responsible.

I’ve written about it often and will continue to do so because I can’t forget the time when our oldest was 4 and I overheard her and her little buddies reporting what their daddies did for a living.

One said hers fixed cars. Another said her daddy built homes. The little red-haired neighbor said her dad was a dentist.

What did Josie’s daddy do?

“He plays with me.”

I remember thinking, man, that’s not going to look good on the loan applications.

That’s just what she thought I did. She never saw me doing any work and any time she’d march into my old basement office with her Barbies and her imagination I’d slam the lid on the laptop and the two of us would sail off to Fantasyland.

But I’ll have lived a life fulfilled if the aforementioned anecdote winds up in the first paragraph of my obituary.

I’m always broke, but my daughters know they are my priority. My euphoric love for them dominates my entire existence 364 days a year.

But on Father’s Day I’d rather they go with their mother to visit her father so I can be left alone.

On Father’s Day I like to think about my father.

His 2004 obituary said he was an optician. To reduce a man’s life to a petty occupation is pathetic tribute.

What did he do with his life?

He played with me.

He taught me how to play catch, ride a bicycle and swing a golf club. It was on his lap where I learned my enduring love for simple pleasures like watching a good movie or any baseball game.

He taught me the importance of family and that being a good father was more important than being a good optician, which he, indeed was.

He taught me no man is better than any other merely because of what’s in his wallet. 

It was because of watching him that I learned just how much shoestring fun this world can be and what a difference it makes if when you ask someone, “Hey, how you doing?” you actually care about the answer.

Here’s what we’d do this Father’s Day if he were still around: we’d be sitting in our homes about 50 miles apart watching the U.S. Open -- no hugs, no cakes, no cards.

We’d be calling each other every 20 minutes or so to talk about the golfers, the course and how much we were looking forward to the next time we could golf together.

Golfing with Dad was to me like church is to other people only with beer and fart jokes.

He very well might have been the most fun man who ever lived. I’ll always remember his funeral as his last and best party. It was a carnival of love. He is much missed by many.

Having him for a father is a prevailing blessing of my life.

I didn’t need Father’s Day to remind me of that. We’d didn’t need to make an appointment to see each other for just one day a year when the people who make greeting cards say we should.

So please excuse me if my smile seems forced on Sunday when I unwrap the inevitable “World’s Best Dad” coffee mug. I’ll patiently listen to the girls read the cheerful crayon notes telling me just what makes me so special but, honestly, my heart won’t be in it.

My mind will be elsewhere

Father’s Day is maybe the only day of the entire calendar year when I don’t feel like being a dad.

I guess I just wish I could still be a son.




Interested in reading more about Paul Rodell? Check out the Pittsburgh Magazine story I wrote about him in 2004. They flattered me by headlining it, "The Life and Death of Joe Pittsburgher."