the smedley log - suburban scrawl

Love’s austere and lonely offices

As I sneak my Father’s Day post just under the wire this year…

The following is from a Father’s Day meditation I posted two years ago:

My father’s not a loud man, not one to boast, even when he’s right and everyone else is pretty much wrong. In my youth I mistook his humility for weakness, but now I realize that the measured approach he took with life’s little twists and turns is what helped him not turn and run when times were tough. He taught me, among other things, that love requires humility (sometimes even humiliation) and that strength is more often demonstrated through patience than through brute force.

He has always been on the quieter side of things, revealing a sense of manhood that can’t be mimicked with the chest-beating machismo so often mistaken for manliness. Physically, he’s always been a strong man, but his intellectual depth and perspective are what have impressed me most as I’ve grown older, and some might even say, wiser.

Or in the words of Robert Hayden:

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

I identified this poem with my father from the first time I read it over a decade ago. It still fits, even if sometimes I forget.

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