Father's Day

is not this weekend, as I was thinking but the week after.  So I didn't need to rush out and get a Father's Day card to mail.

I had picked one out a couple of weeks ago but decided against using it.  It had a picture of Tom Hanks from A League of Our Own and inside was a recording of him saying "Crying?!  There's no crying in baseball!"  There was something on the front about instilling rules in us as we grew up.   I thought it was hilarious.  When I was a kid, we had a plastic ball and bat and sometimes Dad would pitch the ball to me.  I guess I was pretty bad, because one time he said if I hit this ball, he'd get me a pony and a bicycle. I missed.  I didn't get the pony or the bicycle.  Dad also played football with my brother and me, he'd overpower us but that didn't stop us from trying.  And we loved the attention from him.  If he was in a good enough mood to play with us, things were cool.  Usually he was really busy farming or sleeping for the night shift at the factory.  Or he was in a really bad mood and not talking to anybody.  Probably because he was tired from working so hard.  God help us if we did anything to piss him off, which often happened without our even trying.

My dad just had knee replacement surgery and had a very hard time of it.  He spent some time in the nursing home before he came home.  He was home last time I visited but he told me about his stay at the nursing home and about breaking down and crying during a church service there.  That's when I decided the Tom Hanks card couldn't be used this year, or maybe any other year.  Old men can be weepy, I guess as their testosterone declines, their emotions are expressed more easily.  I would not want him to think I was mocking him.