Liberal> Connie Schultz> A Father S Love By Any Other Name

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A Father's Love, by Any Other Name

My father and I always ended phone calls with the same verbal waltz.

"I love you, Dad."

"Yep," he said.

"A-a-a-nd you love me."

"Well, if you already know it, I don't need to tell you, do I?"

Sometimes I'd whine to my mom about my father's reticence, but she would have none of it.

"Oh, stop it," she'd say. "You know he loves you."

"Then why doesn't he say it?"

She'd throw up her hands and punctuate each word with a slice of her hands: "Because you already know it."

Quite the tag team, those two.

Most of you knew my father, even if you never met him.

He was the husband who held the door for his wife and winked at her when he thought no one was looking. The father who caught one glimpse of his daughters' skirts and marched them back upstairs to change. The burly guy who sat on the same stool at the same bar on payday and growled his agreement whenever another guy groused that the world was changing too damn fast.

Dad was the only person in our family who didn't think Archie Bunker was funny, which made us laugh even harder. To Dad, Archie's son-in-law really was a meathead, integration was a war on his neighborhood and women's lib would single-handedly turn us into a nation of girlie-boys.

We argued — a lot — and without the palliative benefit of a live studio audience.

When I was 17, I started wearing aviator glasses and used a chunk of my baby-sitting money to subscribe to The New Yorker and Ms. magazine. My father took this to mean that I was moving to Manhattan and that I never would find a man willing to put up with me.

"You got a lot of opinions there, sister," he'd say, shaking his head.

Nearly 30 years later, I was hired to be a newspaper columnist.

"Finally," Dad said, "you're going to get paid for what you've been throwing around for free." He hung up the phone and proceeded to tell everyone he knew.

In the years since, I've written a number of columns about the important role fathers can play in their daughters' lives.

Whenever a friend becomes the newly minted father of a girl, I rattle off the research findings:

If you tell her she's smart and beautiful, she'll grow up believing you.

If you encourage her to play sports, she'll understand the importance of teamwork.

If you respect her mother, she'll grow up expecting the same regard from every boy she meets.

"Jeez, no pressure or anything," one of my male friends recently said after I gave him the list.

I showed no mercy.

"You set the standard," I said. "If she's straight, she'll likely want to marry a version of you."

"That's scary," he said.

"You bet," I said.

Most women are raised to intuit the good intentions of the men they love. My mom was no exception, and she raised her daughters to understand that a man's love by any other name is still love.

My father showed his love for our family by working himself into an early grave. That wasn't his plan, of course, but it is too often the outcome for manual laborers who insist they will be the last of their kind. He put in lots of overtime and never missed a payment on the bank loans for college tuitions. He drank too much and defied doctors' orders too often, eating food that promises an earlier demise.

Dad spent his 49th birthday recovering from heart bypass surgery. He was never quite the same. Even tough guys like him believe that once a surgeon saws open your rib cage and wraps his hands around your heart, life has finite possibilities.

I spent a lot of time with my dad in the weeks after his surgery. It was fall, and we often would go for slow walks along the Ashtabula River while Mom was at work.

"I'm not going to live forever," he told me more than once. "You'd better get used to the idea."

Unthinkable.

He lived another 20 years. Before his heart gave out at 69, it had softened in ways neither of us could have predicted. This was most evident in the way he interacted with his grandchildren. My favorite photo of Dad shows him smiling at my 2-year-old daughter as he cradles her Cabbage Patch doll named Gloria Steinem.

You know your father loves you, my mother said.

Yes, I did.

Always, I did.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and an essayist for Parade magazine. To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.