Pivoting, adapting, and learning through life’s curveballs. Turning inward to grapple with the daily challenges of adulthood. Wrestling with preconceived notions. Showing love, quietly but surely. In this special Father’s Day collection, six writers share what their fathers and father figures taught them – by setting shining examples to follow.
Mr. Street smarts
There’s a word in Filipino that doesn’t quite translate into English: diskarte.
Why We Wrote This
From showing us how to dodge life’s curveballs to encouraging us to challenge deep-seated worldviews, fathers impart fundamental lessons, often by simply living their values. Here, a handful of writers honor their dads and the lessons they passed down.
It’s used to describe someone with street smarts – resourceful and quick-thinking. Faced with a challenge, they adapt. Someone with diskarte might not have money or connections, but they’ll find a way.
My dad lived this word. As a child, I had a front-row seat to a master class in diskarte.
My grandparents, who never finished elementary school, worked themselves to the bone to provide for their family of seven. My dad understood that education was his best shot at a better future. He earned a degree in chemical engineering and landed a job with Kodak in Hong Kong, where my sisters and I were born.
Years later, he made a bold move, returning to the Philippines during the tail end of the Marcos dictatorship, while others who could were fleeing. He left Kodak as digital technology was taking off, years before it would transform the company completely.
Knowing nothing about real estate or construction, he started his own construction company. He learned everything – plumbing, windows, flooring, roofing – simply by asking questions and making mistakes. His business thrived – and so did we.
In today’s unpredictable world, where a degree no longer guarantees stability and political tides shift overnight, my dad’s diskarte has served me well.
Lose a job? Pivot.
Have to start over? That’s life.
Keep learning. Keep moving. Keep trying.
Just as he did.
– Sherilyn Siy
A surprise in the glove box
My dad was a quiet man and, like many of his generation, more a critic than a cheerleader. He didn’t like it when I slept late, he grumbled about my book-buying habit (“They’re free at the library”), and on the rare report card loaded with A’s, he’d zero in on the solitary B.
I craved encouragement and praise, but he didn’t speak that language. The best compliment I got from him was after he’d spent two days teaching me to drive a stick shift. “You drive too fast,” he said. “But you’re a good driver.” I filed that away like a gem.
A few years later, after several rejections, I finally landed my dream job at a newspaper. He sighed, disappointed it wasn’t full time.
No matter, I was thrilled to be there, delighted to see my name in print. If I mentioned my latest piece, he’d change the subject and ask instead when I’d have benefits or work normal hours.
A few months later, he passed away unexpectedly. I offered to help clean out his truck. In the glove box was a small stack of newspaper clippings. My stories. The edges were worn, the paper soft at the creases – handled often, kept like treasures.
My father taught me that people show love in different ways, a lesson that has served me well as the mother of two sons. Love doesn’t always appear the way we expect or want it to. Sometimes, it lives in the folds.
– Courtenay Rudzinski
Schooled by a scholar
In my childhood home the shelves burst with books: scholarly volumes of foreign policy and history, mysteries, tomes in Latin and Japanese, biographies, and fiction. On the floor, waist-high piles of books tottered like miniature leaning towers of Pisa.
My father has always been an avid learner and reader. As a boy, I recall him reading every night on the couch. Whenever he came across a word he didn’t know, he would write it down on an index card to look up later, and encouraged me to do the same. To this day, he chews through books like a goat eating grass: steady, consistent, unrelenting.
Born in a blue-collar Polish neighborhood in Detroit, the son of a homemaker and a factory worker, Dad was the first in his family to graduate from high school. He attended seminary school, then college, and then got his Ph.D. in East Asian history. He studied in Japan and met my mom there.
He bequeathed to me a genuine love of learning. Not learning in order to get something, but learning for its own sake.
He has always encouraged me to wrestle with ideas and uncomfortable truths, to challenge my worldview, even if it makes me change my mind. In a world where we all too often pick out our team jersey, superglue it to our bodies, and flee to our preferred echo chamber, my dad’s freethinking spirit is one I cherish.
– Zachary Przystup
Floating on faith
It took me a long time to learn to swim. I had an understandable fear of sinking. My father did his best to allay this concern. When I was 10 years old, he began taking me to the pool at the local YMCA, where I would lie on my back across his outstretched arms as he gently repeated, “The water wants you to float. Your body wants to float.”
But no matter how hard I tried to believe this, when he removed his arms, I sank like a stone.
However, the instruction continued, week after week. My dad’s persistence was a product of experience; mine was born of not wanting to let him down. The triumph came after two months of patient attempts to simply float. My father withdrew his arms, and there I lay, upon the water, serene and capable in this first step toward actually swimming.
When I think back, I wonder: Was it the water that held me up? Was it my father’s supportive arms? Or maybe it was something more challenging for a child to grasp: my dad’s unfaltering faith in me.
– Robert Klose
Talking man-to-man
My father was very handy, and when I was growing up, he did most of the work on our cars. Passing our garage Saturday mornings, I’d often hear Daddy in spirited conversation, though I could see only one set of legs jutting out from beneath our old Ford.
Whom was my father talking to while he drained the oil or checked a leaky radiator? Daddy was talking to himself.
In a household that included a wife, six kids, and a couple of grandparents, my father didn’t lack conversation partners. But talking to himself was a favorite pastime.
Despite his many responsibilities, Daddy’s calm assurance grew from his power to talk himself through whatever each day brought.
Like my father I also talk to myself, while cooking dinner, mowing the lawn, or rounding the block on an afternoon walk. These one-sided colloquies have become a welcome source of reflection, helping me to be a better husband, father, and friend.
I have my dad to thank for showing me that when you need someone to talk to, it’s OK to start with you.
– Danny Heitman
The men who molded me
When I think about manhood, I think of gumbo, a dish that requires many ingredients to make it delicious. That is the best way to describe the tribe of men who nurtured me.
I didn’t have a father growing up, but I had a village of men who cared about me.
My grandfather was one of only three adults in my life whom I never heard curse. He was patient and always encouraged me to work hard and not to take the easy way out. My Uncle Charlie showed me the importance of self-confidence and told me that he loved me, and that he believed I could do anything in life that I wanted.
I graduated from college because Uncle Charlie, the first in the family to attend college, laid the groundwork for me. He taught me how to knot a tie and to look another man in the eye when I spoke to him.
My Uncle Bernard showed me how to take care of my responsibilities by always taking care of his, and by consistently showing up in my life.
I cherish the jewels that these men gave me over the years.
– Ira Porter
