I never understood why he was always there. Standing alone along the fence line or hanging out in the empty, sun-drenched stands. It was high school soccer practice. Practice, for goodness sake! But there he was. Every day it seemed. Every time we rolled out onto the field.
I just couldn’t understand why he would hang out and watch a bunch of knuckleheads run through monotonous drills, get yelled at by a coach and try at every opportunity to drop some poor, unsuspecting teammate’s shorts. Most of us didn’t want to be there. So why would a parent?
Tampa’s weather can be terminal. It’s such a ferocious mix of heat and humidity. In 20 minutes, it could fully cook a bag of rice left out on the sidewalk. Dense and sweltering, it burned your lungs and squeezed you like a sandwich press. Then a man with a whistle barked at you to run laps until your feet swelled up like watermelons. When guys dropped, we would just bury them right there on the field and keep on running.
So to me it made no sense why my dad showed up all those afternoons. There wasn’t much to see, and there had to be better things to do at the end of a long day. Why was he always there?
Then it hit me the other night while I sat on the edge of a pool watching my daughter swim.
Not a swim meet — she’s only four. This was swimming lessons. She doggie paddles, and the teacher says, “don’t forget to put your head in the water.” She does so reluctantly, like she thinks there might be little fish down there waiting to nibble on her lips. (Who knows what goes through the mind of a 4-year-old.) But when her head does go in and her feet start kicking, she looks like a stub-nosed torpedo. She’s fast.
There I was with my wife, staring wide-eyed and in complete amazement as she dove for plastic toys, floated on her back and ventured farther and farther into the deep waters at the far edge of the pool. (“Be careful, little fish. There might be sharks out there!”)
And I would smile, even clap, as I watched. Her head would turn as she got back to the wall. She wanted to see if we were watching. At the end she would ask us, “Did you see everything?”
Yes.
“Everything? You saw everything?”
Doubly, yes.
Which got me thinking about my dad. I was beginning to understand. Maybe it takes being a dad yourself. Probably back then I thought it was just his way of embarrassing me. Because kids always think parents have some evil master plan designed with the express purpose of embarrassing the pee out of them. Right?
But my parents were divorced, and the jolly guy known as my dad didn’t get to see my brother and me off to school. Nor could he chat us up when we came home. We saw him on the weekends mostly, and the only chance he got during the week to see us was at practices. So that’s what he did.
And I get that now. That it’s worth the heat, the traffic, the time after work when you’d rather be relaxing — all to spend a little time with your kid. Just watching. Admiring. Being proud. Not because you have to, or that you should. But because you want to.
My wife tells me it’s OK if I don’t make every afternoon swim lesson. It cuts into my running. My cooking. My relaxing (there’s always plenty of beer in the fridge and I DVR a lot of soccer games.) But each day I can’t wait. It really is my thrill.
Besides, right now she enjoys having me there. One day, when she’s a gangly teenager worried about the shame and embarrassment of even having parents, she’ll consider shooting me with tranquilizer darts when she spies me along the fence.
But that’s OK. I’ll still be there. Carrying on the tradition. That’s what dad’s do, even when it’s hot out.