The Greatest Dad in the World

By Roger Rosenblatt

If I had to explain the bottomless public fascination with the story of the Titanic, I wouldn't pin it on the idea that the sunken ship represented a moral tale of hubris or of careless luxury but rather on the fact that it was both a magnificent and flawed piece of work, and that it became most interesting when it was lying out of reach underwater. How to get down to it and bring it to the surface? How to grasp something so wonderful, confident and ruined, a creation as immense as the past?

Or, given the approaching holiday, am I thinking of fathers and their unreachable, unfathomable greatness? Fathers and sons; father knows best; life with father. Farther and farther away they grow, not only when they die and are sunk for good but in life too. Big Daddy. Daddy Long Legs. For Father's Day, to be on the safe side, better order extra extra large.

When a man becomes a father, he is suddenly inflated to the size of the Sta-Puf Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters. His shoes don't fit; his hatband leaves a mark. He can barely see his feet, at which his children gather, look up and can barely see his head. And the weight! I have tried to dredge my father from his ocean floor for nearly 25 years, since he went down, at the fairly young age of 67. In a decade or so, I will be older that he is, or was, yet I come no closer to reaching him now than when I was a kid. Old as I get, I shall never be smarter, surer, bigger. I dive for clues in the dark water. I go down to go up.

With my father and me, it was World War III (All-Nukes) much of the time, yet even in more serene relationships, everything gets overblown. Children strain to get their arms around their father's thighs. Too thick, too strong. Today my boys can beat me in arm wrestling without half trying. My daughter can outrun me in a race; no sweat. But they do not savor these victories. I am the father who should not be conquered. One afternoon when I was 14, my father, once a powerful and muscular swimmer, ran out of breath as we swam to a float in Cape Cod Bay. Panting like a hooked fish, he leaned on me as we swam back. My heart sank.

But of course, he could never be anything but monumental. It is the fate of fathers to be enormous, and the responsibility as well. One must be careful not to abuse one's stature, not to be harsh, not to bully, not to crush. God the Father must have known something of that self-governing caution when he realized that he could never pick on anyone his own size.

And yet one falls. I hear the hearts of my own children sink whenever I am petty, selfish, small. I am not supposed to be small. The day my oldest boy Carl beat (trounced) me in one-on-one--at last, killed his dad!--I fumed like a Nero, stalked off, refused to shake his hand. I'm surprised that I did not disappear through a crack in the playground.

No one thinks of giants from the giant's point of view, but it's not easy being big. One is aware of the menace one poses as he stomps about. Dad wants to be a benevolent despot, but he has all that heft, and sometimes he crashes into the china. "Pop! Pop!" cries Keye Luke, the No. 1 son in the Charlie Chan movies. His incompetence is funny, but he is really desperate to please the All-Wise, All-Wisecracking round Titan in the white suit, who is sometimes the detective and sometimes the crime.

Hard, hard. Years ago, when I was preparing to interview President-elect Ronald Reagan, I read that his son Michael complained that his father had never attended any of his college football games. I also read that Reagan had made the same complaint about his father, an alcoholic for whom he had felt deep, painful yearnings. So, in our interview, I asked Reagan if he ever recognized his father in himself. It was the only time when his mask of affability fell, and we were very quiet for a minute.

Fathers are softer in this era, more temperate and hands-on, like mothers. Still, they remain very big deals. The children of my baby-boom friends look up to their kinder, gentler dads with no less awe than I did to mine. Post-Dr. Spock, I the father am somewhere between the brooder and the hugger--my distance due as much to my being a writer as to my generation--but I am still quite huge.

I have become what every father is, the Vast Unachievable--feared, revered, adored and deriving authority in part from not being reached. He whom one seeks to imitate is inimitable. Everything about him is bigness: big advice, big adventure, big protection and also big disapproval, big tension, big trouble. And with all that, the bigness of his incomprehensibility. My dad was a cipher to me, and I am one to my children--a loving but strange, often distracted man, full of gaiety and silences--the one they are and cannot be.

Come Sunday, I will open my cards--"To the Greatest Dad in the World"--and know everything that means. The children will send their love, my father will smile faintly from the photograph on my dresser and I will look up and down from my station in the sea.