The Father's Day gift we can all give our dads

My dad has been gone since 1999 but I’m finally giving my dad a gift I couldn’t give him when he was alive: unconditional love.

Today, I will love the best of him and bless the rest of him.

I will pause, open his lunch pail, try on his hard hat and give him the gift he always asked for but never got.

Buying Dad a Father’s Day gift was never easy. He only wanted one thing and made the same request every year. Actually, has asked for two things, two things his litter of 11 could never give him.

Peace and quiet.

We always told him if he really wanted that, he shouldn’t have had 11 kids.

He never really wanted anything. He had gone without for his entire childhood and sacrificed to give his 9 siblings, and then his 11 kids, a better life than he ever got.

When we bought him a new coat once, he still wore the old one patched together with duct tape. When we bought him a new tie, it stayed in the back of the closet.

So we ended up buying him the same thing every Father’s Day, work socks, work shirts and a pack of the red and blue bandannas he used to wipe the sweat from his brow putting on roofs. When the bandannas wore out, he tied them to the end of the ladders on top of his station wagon as warning flags to the cars behind him.

When people say they grew up blue collar, I always smile. My dad lived in blue collar shirts, except for Sundays, going to Mass day. Every once in a while he wore a hat too, an Irish cap or a fishing hat to protect him from the sun.

He rarely got to actually fish. He took us a few times, lugged all the bamboo poles and bobbers then spent the whole time untangling our lines and putting our worms on the hooks. We rarely caught anything. That many kids will scare an entire lake of fish into hiding for days.

My dad had no hobbies except work and keeping all of us from accidentally killing ourselves by falling off the roof, blowing up our homemade bazookas or losing fingers from the illegal fireworks we tossed in the barrel where we burned our trash, back in the day when that was not only allowed but encouraged.

It was a different era.

Dad was from a different era.

I’m still trying to wrap my head and hands and heart around who he was as a dad and as a man.

Every dad is so many things. Tom Brett was a father of 11, a devout Catholic who shuffled to communion, always sat on the Saint Joseph statue side at Immaculate Conception Church and knelt at the side of his bed every night to pray.

He was a tail gunner in World War II who flew over 30 missions in the China Burma theatre of war. He was the brother who worked hard to send his siblings to college or to buy them ice skates or better cars, things he never got.

He was the boy who never had a childhood. Tom Brett was born in 1915, during WWI. He was only 3 when the 1918 flu killed 20 million worldwide. He was a teenager during the Great Depression when his family lost their home and land and all their livestock.

My Dad quit school to work and feed his siblings. He never finished high school. I don’t recall seeing him ever read a book, just the newspapers, religiously. What mesmerized him in those newspapers? I always wanted to know. He just might be the reason I became a journalist 36 years ago.

Dad waves to me every time I see a station wagon with ladders tied to the top. He never owned a truck, he just piled everything in and on our station wagon.

And his garage? The Shop was the original Home Depot, and almost as large.

My dad wasn’t big on showing emotions except for simple kindnesses interrupted by terrible random outbursts of rage, so I was shocked when we were clearing out The Shop after he died and found a brown paper grocery bag. I dug inside and found Father’s Day cards.

Dad had saved them all.

That’s my new Father’s Day memory to savor. I picture him reading those cards one last time before he tucked them in that bag, there in his Shop, where maybe he did get some measure of peace and quiet.

Today I’ll spend a moment in my own garage, where I keep his hard hat, his work boots and his metal lunch pail, and in a moment of peace and quiet, I’ll magnify the best of him and bless the rest.