4 - Sunday, June 21, 1992 - North Shore News Nice work Dad, you made it through another year THIS BUSINESS of Father’s Day — is it a sexist piece of monsense that ought to be junked, or is the modern father the epitome of courage and devotion, a heroic figure who deserves to be more or less worshipped? 1 pose this question objectively, you understand. I happen to be the father of four. Two of my offspring are adults now, two are still kids. The age range is 29, 27, 13 and eight. The oldest has a daughter, aged five, which makes me a grandfa- ther as well as a father, talk about compounding the crime! lL often joke that the right way to do it would be to go straight to the grandfather stage without the messy intermediate stuff of being a father, but that’s not how it works. It’s great being a grandfather. The first thing you get to do is whisper in the grandchild’s ear: “*Hey, kid, if you want to know what's really what, check it out with me. Your parents? Come on, what could they possibly know that | don’t know better?”’ As I perceive it, a grandfather's duties have to include subversion. Who else is better positioned to counteract the youthful nonsense that is bound to be spewed by the grandchild’s parents, who, being ‘**kids’’ themselves, can hardly be expected to get anything:straight? They're still learning. Whereas Gramps is at the peak of his knowledge, based on hard-earned experience. He has at his disposal precedents and refer- ences that go back to long before the mere parents were born. You can’t tackle a loaded sub- ject like Father’s Day without ask- ing what’s wrong with this pic- ture? Why Father’s Day? Why not Grandfather’s Day? So long as his father is alive, a man is still, at least in one fundamental relation- ship, a boy. On average, men die earlier than women. One might ask one- self, what is there to celebrate on Father’s Day? Our defeat in the longevity contest department? It’s stress that gets you in the end, you see. And few experiences can be more stressful than being a father. Stressful as it may be being a husband, that particular role is a piece of cake comparcd with being a father. | mean, in the crunch, if you simply can’t live with a woman, you walk away. Not so with children. Thus, a father is someone who has no place to run. He is stuck with his kids until he dies. Of course this is considered on balance to be the main point of existence, to spawn a quasi-clone or two and watch them get up and shamble around, bumping into things. IMPROVE YOUR ENGLISH! English as # Second Langtsge Ctasses for Adults Upper Beginner & intermediate team Conversation, Reading, Writing, Listening, Grammar, Pronunciation At 515 West Windsor Road North Vancouver Monday, Wednesday, Frigay 10:00 AM - 12:00 NOON Starting MONDAY JULY 6, 1992 COST: $40 per month REGISTRATION: Phone 985-4041 From 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM Mon. to Fri. A Community Service provided by Delbrook Baptist Church Bob Hunter STRICTLY PERSONAL No spawning, no evolution. If the genetic material that is goading us on with its complex DNA codes wants to experience higher levels of sensation, it is forced to replicate in order to grow. Individual deaths are presum- ably of no interest to the genes, which are just trying to make themselves immortal. A father is therefore a kind of genetic host whose cellular func- tion is to divide and multiply. It's a thing we were born to do, al- though. obviously, not all DNA trains arrive on time, and some get derailed. I mention these deep thoughts in passing not just for the purpose of gratuitously stimulating the reader’s own mystical musings about the meaning of life, but to put the Father's Day ritual into its ultimate context — namely, some- thing fundamental to do with the Gene Programmer’s scheme. Go ahead, use the word “God,”’ but | kind of like Gene Programmer. I’m sure It doesn’t give a damn what we caf! It. OK, that’s the religious background. Socially, | contend that despite the trappings of a high-tech civilization, at ground level most of us still live strikingly primitive lives. We’re still at the “‘hunter-gatherer’’ phase, just better organized than before. We may live further apart from other members of our tribe, but basic tribal units remain largely intact, in some ways more so than ever. Thus, Father’s Day serves a purpose much like a potlatch, whose main function is to remind everybody in the tribe of just where they all stand in relation to each other, It may be sexist nonsense to celebrate the patriach in a family, but then life itself must be sesist nonsense too, otherwise we wouldn't have these fun- nily-designed bodies with their bizarre parts that fit into other people's equaily (if oppositely) bizarre parts, etc. One of my all-time favorite cartoons depicted a naked little boy looking at his wienie with some horror, listening to his mother say: ‘‘Just thank the good Lord that thing didn’t grow on your forehead.’’ Indeed, fatherhood is a bit like that. You might as well have it grow out of your forehead. Male genitalia are already so hi- larious, how much more hilarious can it get? I mean, obviously we didn’t become fathers by meditating on a mountain or chanting mantras. We became fathers because the genes pre-programmed us with carnal lust. It’s a messy business, lust. But it gets the job done. And the next thing you know, you’ve gone from being a sraug young stud to an agent of evolution, staggering under the awesome burden of responsibility for an en- tire human life — yeh, more than that: its offspring too. And theirs. And those after them, the- oretically ad infinitum. It’s enough to wear a fella down. But you rise to it, eh? No matter how poorly your society has equipped you, what language you speak, whichever belief system makes you happy, a guy who becomes a father transcends himself in mysterious ways. Celebrate Father’s Day? Hell, there should be dancing in the streets, displays of totemic wor- ship, workshops in fa- ther-awareness and appreciation, perhaps even phailic balloons released into the air, and certainly a clause guaranteeing our rights in the Constitution. , Congratulations all around, mien. We did it for another year. 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