Eileen down the road in RI Twelfth has a breathtakingly beautiful post about things she learned from her Dad today, so you should go read it. Trust me. Go. Now.

My dad emigrated from Ireland when he was a teenager in the 1920s, and took whatever jobs he could find to bring his brother, sister, and parents over. He washed dishes, cooked, got a job as a trolley motorman when New York's streets were still criss-crossed with light rail and learned to climb up the side of the car and poke the contact back onto the high-tension wire overhead with a long wooden pole. When the buses took over, he didn't make the transition; he never had the chance for more than an elementary education, and tests and regulations had no interest for him. He spent the rest of his working life as a Teamster, Local 804, loading packages onto trucks at a UPS sorting center in downtown Brooklyn.

The most important lesson I learned from him — probably the only lesson he ever explicitly tried to teach me — came from a Sunday-morning candy store heart-to-heart over pretzel sticks and orange drink, and it was this: Don't ever be ashamed of anything you have to do to take care of your family. He delivered it with an intensity I had never seen before, and even as a teenager, I realized it was not just words, that he had lived it. Moved from a cottage in Donegal to a strange foreign city and worked like a dog to bring his family together. Got his brother and sister on their feet in America, and took care of his parents until they died. Then he did whatever it took to put food on the table, working overtime so my mom could take five years off from her job after I was born. She made a lot more than he did, but we got by.

Like many Irish Catholic fathers, he was never the most demonstrative, uncomfortable with words and displays of affection. Not until after he died, unexpectedly, of a heart attack while I was away at college, did I learn the story behind the picture he kept in my parents' bedroom. It was a photo-booth image of me, taken on some long-forgotten boardwalk, a printout from the early days of computer graphics, a 10x10 headshot made up of ASCII characters, the way computers represented images in the days before lasers or even dot-matrix. He framed that picture and put it up near the window where he used to sit. All through college, I would come home on a break and notice that picture getting more and more smudged, the ink on the face becoming smeared, letters blurring into a gray wash. I would notice, and shrug, and assume it was steam from the radiator or something.

It wasn't steam, of course. He was kissing it every night before he went to bed.

My mom told me years later. The profound Irishness of it still takes my breath away. And I still have that picture, on our porch, and it reminds me of him, reminds me of what it means to be a father and to love, across the desperate gulf of the generations, children who will in some ways forever remain a mystery to us. To do whatever is required, without question or complaint. And to never be ashamed of anything you need to do to keep them safe, and healthy, and happy.

To all you fathers out there, my congratulations and thanks for all you do. There may be only one day a year when the smudged image starts to life, and smiles, and hugs you back, whether in the flesh or in memory. Celebrate the day.