Father's Day 2016: What Makes Your Dad the Best Ever?

Above my left eyebrow is a scar so slight that no one knows it’s there until I point it out.

Years have faded it, or wrinkles elsewhere have made it seem like just one more, but it’s there, revealing itself when I smile — as I always do when I think how it got there in the first place.

I was about 5 at the time. I was my Dad’s shadow back then, following him too closely as he scooped corn from the back of a truck. It bled profusely when the corner of the shovel made contact, and I’m not sure he ever forgave himself for injuring his little girl with a grain shovel.

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The scar served as an important farm safety reminder when it was still visible. Now, almost erased by the years, it’s still a symbol still of how much I adored him.

Until I didn’t.

My teenage years and young adulthood strained our relationship. I think that’s especially hard on a dad whose daughter, up until she entered “the devil years” about 12, thought he hung the moon. I didn’t speak to him for a week once and wanted to go for two, but when he winced back tears, called me by a pet name only he was ever allowed to use, and asked if I was ever going to talk to him again, I relented. 

The truth was, I was tired of being mad at him, but too stubborn and immature to seek detente. 

It wasn’t immediately better, of course. It never is between rebellious daughters and doting, protective fathers. But by the time he died 22 years ago, we were best friends again.

A true character, he talked like no one I knew, using very British words like bollix and probably made-up words like “angley-gogglin" and mixing them together in a sentence: “Beth, you bollixed it up when you parked the car in the garage angley-gogglin.”

He was teasing, mostly. I was a lousy driver.

In the comments below, tell us why your dad is the best dad anywhere. 

But it was give and take, and I had the last word in a newspaper column, which I waved over his head like a big stick that taunted “careful with what you say or you’ll wind up in my column.”

I think he staged antics to provide me fodder — like the time the cat population soared to alarming numbers and we joked about changing the sign in the front yard that read “Dalbey Angus Farm” to “Kitty City.”

He was so soft-hearted when it came to animals that folks would dump strays on his farm. One of them was a dog he wasn’t going to pet or like, but named Barney all the same. He complained plenty, “He’s not my dog. I’m not going to pet him.” But, of course, he did, and the dog stayed on indefinitely. 

But the cats were something else. They were wild cats and corralling them was like trying to sculpt Jell-O. He had caught one once, but it ripped his hand to ribbons, so he had to let it go.

I was home for a visit a few years before he died and looked out the window to see him loping across the yard with a fish net, trying to capture them. He was a large man, so this was spectacle enough, but the real humor was when he got one under his net and stood there, unaware that anyone was watching him, looking perplexed. 

I could watch silently no longer. Doubled over in laughter, I quizzed him about the next part of his plan. “Now what are you going to do? You’re still going to have to touch the cat.”

He walked away, disgusted. “This better not end up in a newspaper column,” he said, knowing it would.

And it did.

He began feeding the cats. That didn’t domesticate them and they weren’t what he called “good workers” – mousers, that is. It’s not politically correct, but it’s funny in this context: He called them “the welfare cats.” He also had a special name for cows that didn’t calve and sows that didn’t farrow, but that’s another story.

He was still feeding the feral cats when he died. But he didn’t name them.

(This column originally appeared on Patch in 2012.)