A fatherhood timeline

It was Father's Day today and the tributes to dads across social media can make a lesser mortal believe he could never be a halfway decent father. How could anybody live up to these testimonials?

Here's a secret, kids: we were just winging it. We'd never been fathers before and, sure, we learn a lot about being a father by our fathers but when we're young, we have only one goal: not to be our fathers.

And then kids come along and right around the time we think we could write a parenthood book, our kids turn into, well, the kids they're supposed to be at a particular age and we wonder what it is we did wrong to be so much like our father and could we please get a do-over and be better this time?



And eventually we reach an uneasy truce with each other and they go off to be the people they're destined to be and we're left with something not quite approaching satisfaction at a job well done, but an appreciation that they didn't die or -- if we're really lucky -- they didn't go to prison.

And then one year it's Fathers Day and they call or stop by and during a conversation on the deck over drinks when they acknowledge they didn't really bang up a car way back when by doing wheelies in the snow but took a corner too fast while drag racing and we don't care because they are alive, you love the everloving crap out of them, and we notice something else -- something different -- while we watch our children in their adulthood on the deck -- the ones who hold your DNA and then ones you picked up along the way: they're just the tremendous people the world needs desperately and we and our partner (again, if you're lucky) did a hell of a job.

And then they tell us that.

And then -- and only then -- do we get to experience the real euphoria of being a father.

All because we were just winging it and doing the best we could.

Thanks, Dad.

Coming up for air

Photo: Nate Ryan

A few years ago, when Meniere's Disease was leaving me in desperate shape and a doctor in Woodbury had pronounced that he had done all he could, which wasn't nearly enough, I sat in the office of a young (to me)  neurotologist who was my next best hope.

"I love you and Mary on The Current," he said as he walked in the door, just prior to introducing himself.

That's when I knew we'd become great friends.

A few weeks ago, "Bob" stopped by an open hangar door (I always leave the hangar door up to encourage people to come chat) at Fleming Field in South St. Paul. Bob is welder for Metro Transit. He's just a few years younger than me.

He likes airplanes.

And Mary Lucia.

On his last visit, he told me about listening to the 4:20 "newscast" while under his welder's hood, working on the busses that take you home.

And there you have the secret of The Current and, in particular, my friend, Mary:  there is no limit, no template, no pigeon hole into which its -- her -- listeners can be placed. Welders. Scientists. Old people. Young people.

Why? Because in an age in which we are a technological arm's length from each other, she breaks through our differences and stations in life and speaks only to us.

I know that when I talked to Mary in the few minutes we spent each day, I not only had her in my vision, I had Bob, and my doctor, and all the people who took the time to say "hello" over the years (and certainly drop messages to me the other day)  in my mind. I could see all of them listening, and it's always been that way whenever I was on the radio.

I've never asked but I suspect it's that way with Mary, too. How can it not be? Just listen to her. She's talking to you.

When Mary came down to my third floor cubicle the day she returned from her leave in November 2015, I didn't think it unusual at the time, even though she rarely -- never? -- visited the third floor.

So when she was wrapping up our time together last week and said that I was the first person she sought out, that was the first time I put the significance of her visit together. That was the moment I had to take off my glasses and wipe my eyes. That was the moment we lost it.




She pushed the button to start Ella Fitzgerald's version of "One More for the Road", turned off the microphone, and we hugged. We hugged for a good long time.

"Do you remember the last scene of the Mary Tyler Moore show," I whispered.

"The one where they all group hug to the Kleenex box?" she said. And we laughed.

We walked out of the studio -- I think Mary was heading for a well-deserved smoke break -- and there was the Current staff with champagne. I needed to hug again.


Photo: Nate Ryan

I'm not a hugger. At least I wasn't.

But being told you mattered during a person's worst times is an honor that I'd never felt before and, though I was already missing my time with Mary before our segment was even finished (note the last question in the interview she did with me a few weeks before our last show), it constituted a moment that sears into the soul.

It was the moment I learned I wasn't who I thought I was.