Still feeling presence of dads after they're gone

I was sitting at a red light a few days ago, contemplating a tree standing kitty-corner across the intersection. It was a fine tree, tall and flush, with a long and graceful arch to its trunk.

Then something popped into my head, the way things sometimes do.

It was an image of another fine tree, a towering oak in my backyard. And suddenly I was recalling a photograph of my father and father-in-law sitting on lawn chairs under the magnificent canopy of that tree, eating from paper plates and basking in the shade. It was a birthday party on one of those picture-perfect days in late summer, and they were content.

The memory was at once comforting and sobering. Comforting because of the role those two dads played in my life. Sobering because both of them are gone now, along with the tree that sheltered them that day.

My father-in-law died in 2009. The tree was felled by a nor’easter in 2010. My father passed away in 2020.

It’s a hard reality. Everyone and everything eventually dies, and yet life goes on because it must. But if you’re lucky, the ones you lose continue to be a presence as you forge on.

I’m fortunate to be able to count myself among the lucky. I can still feel their presence, even after all the years. I can still hear their voices. They seem to float by in the breeze, easy to summon when needed.

I can still see the twinkle in my father’s eye as he launches into a long and hilarious story about the absurdities of life, the kind of story you wish would never end — and that always imparts something of value you’d be wise to retain. I can still see the delighted expression on my father-in-law’s face as he begins to answer a query about life on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem in the 1920s, or his service in the Army in World War II, taking care to make sure you understand and appreciate how different life was in those days.

I still remember my father at the dinner table talking about some seemingly insurmountable problem at work, and how he arrived at a solution. I still remember my father-in-law showing me how to deal with a screw hole that had grown too wide for the screw by stuffing the hole with pieces of toothpick to give it a tighter fit.

Neither ever mentioned the word resourcefulness or the phrase out-of-the-box. They didn’t have to.

When you examine your own life, when you dig deep into the kind of person you are, you can see how much you learned from what they did and said, and sometimes from what they did not do or say. You can see the guideposts they left, the ones you followed and the ones you veered around, each helping to shape the person you have become.

I think most of us want to leave a positive stamp on this life. Most profoundly, that means a positive stamp on the loved ones who continue on after you. In the end, they are the most personal part of your legacy.

But legacy-building can be tricky business. It seems to me that the best ones are built without consciously trying. Without intent. Built by the quiet example of simply living a good life.

It might be that the image of those two men sitting under that tree came to me this time because this is the time of year we celebrate our fathers. But the fortunate truth is that the image and the celebration have come to me on many a day. They earned the legacy they made. I hope one day to be so lucky.

Columnist Michael Dobie is a retired member of the editorial board.

By Michael Dobie

michael.dobie1@newsday.commwdobie

Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.