A Word for Father's Day: Dad

Word of the Week

I guess I’d hardly be alone when I say that my father, my Dad, was the most important man in my life. I’m always returning to the things he said and did, and even to things he didn’t say. One way I knew that my father didn’t like somebody is when I noticed that he never said anything about the guy, though the opportunities were plenty. He wasn’t timid. He just did not bother himself with arguments. “Fa’ tu come piacere,” he’d say, retaining a little of his boyhood Italian. “Do what you like,” he meant, as he shrugged and walked away.

He gave me all kinds of advice, often by example, and his political opinions were based on shrewd observation, as when the state milk agency basically shut down the family-owned dairy farm he worked at when he was a teenage boy. The milk was great, always fresh and cold, and nobody ever complained, but the big dairies “helped” the state legislature write a few new regulations, and poof, just like that, the little guy in the country was gone. My Dad thought I was the smartest person he ever met, and when I was a little boy, I don’t know that he knew exactly what was up with me or how to deal with me. But I always knew he loved me and was proud of me. It’s funny, though, how praise from your Dad remains with you all your life, and often not for things you’d expect. One day, we were at a small playground on our block, before the town sold it off to a grumpy old lady next door, and Dad was talking to an old-timer while I was there, listening. They were chatting about wild blueberries. “Nobody picks anymore,” said the old guy. “Tony here does,” my father said. “I take him with me up the Archbald Mountain. He’s a good picker, too — picks ’em clean,” meaning, without a lot of sticks and leaves and green berries. Every time I pick berries now — and I do that a lot, every summer, and not just blueberries — I think about Dad.

He passed away from cancer in 1991, and though we knew it was coming, I think that none of us — me, my mother, my brother, and my two sisters — had any idea of how it would affect us. I felt as if suddenly I’d been thrust into a new set of responsibilities, though I’d been, myself, a Dad for two and a half years by then. I dream about him often, and in some of those dreams he is a quiet watcher, always comforting in his presence. And I remember him in prayer every night, as I remember also the greatest father-in-law a guy could ever have, Debra’s Dad, Herb, who passed away in 2020.

I don’t find our Word of the Week, Dad, in English literature before 1600. The earliest use I’m aware of, in literature, appears in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy, when a sarcastic pleasure-seeker, learning that his father has died, blurts out, “O dead Dad!” My guess is that the word comes into English through Welsh: tad, father. In the novel How Green Was My Valley, grown sons call their patriarch father Dada, which for them was not baby-talk, but rather the affectionate way to address him: just like “Papa.” Though the basic word is tad, Welsh alters the beginnings of nouns under many common conditions, so that my Father is fy Nhad, her Father is eu Thad, and your Father is dy Dad. Jesus, in the Welsh New Testament, addressing the Father in prayer, begins, “O Dad!” It’s strange but true, that of the four forms, the softened Dad is probably the most common, given the typical constructions of sentences. Our Father, in case you’re wondering, is ein Tad.