The Father of All Editorials

Written by Chad Messer

Saturday, 14 June 2008

Happy Fathers Day If all goes according to schedule, this editorial should be posted on Fathers’ Day, and as such this piece of internet hilarity might not be as drop-dead funny as the other things you will find on this site. In fact, it might be a tad maudlin, but it’s for good reason. You see, one of my favorite people to watch on TV, the great newsman Tim Russert, died on Friday of a massive heart attack, two days before Fathers’ Day, at the age of 58.

My dad is 58. 58 is not old, and it’s not supposed to mark the end of your life, especially if you are leaving both your father and your son (not to mention your wife) behind. That’s not supposed to happen. But Tim Russert was a person that I knew only from television and books, so it’s not as if I lost a member of my family, but it all comes back to the idea that my father is 58, too, and has a much worse heart condition than Tim Russert had.

So, no jokes about dads today. If you have a dad that you love and who loves you back, be good to him today, and thank him. If you have a dad and need to patch things up with him, get started on that now. If you don’t have a dad or you have a bad one, um, you get the day off. Go pet a puppy or something. If you are a dad, for Christ’s sake be a good one.

If you have a dad, granddad, or other father figure in your life, tell them you love them today, because there will come a day that they will be gone, and you’ll lament every opportunity that you didn’t take to say ‘thank you’ or ‘I love you’. Then do that same thing every day for the rest of your life. You won’t regret it.

The thing about being a baby daddy is that the baby never grows up in the daddy’s eyes. We’ll always be that little boy or little girl (or hermaphrodite, for all you completists) that dad damn near dropped on the delivery room floor the day you were born.

One of the luckiest parts of my life so far is that I have an awesome dad who loves me even though I’m nowhere near as awesome as he is. I am thankful every day that we have the relationship that we do, because I know of a lot of people who don’t have such a relationship. The main reason that I am the man that I am is because of his example and that is a gift that you can’t buy in a store.

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