If there is a universal complaint from men about their fathers, it is that their dads lacked patience. I remember one rainy day when I was about six and my father was putting a new roof on his mother’s house, a dangerous job when it’s dry, much less wet. I wanted to help. He was impatient and said no. I made a scene and got the only spanking¹ I can recall. He had chuckled² at that memory many times over the years, but I never saw the humor.

Only now that I’ve struggled to find patience in myself when Matthew insists he help me paint the house or saw down dead trees in the back yard am I able to see that day through my father’s eyes. Who’d have guessed I’d be angry with my father for 30 years, until I relived similar experiences with my own son, who, I suppose, is angry now with me.

More surprisingly, contrary to my teen-age conviction that I wasn’t at all like my father, I have come to the greater realization³. I am very much like him. We share the same sense of humor, same stubbornness, same voice even. Although I didn’t always see these similarities as desirable, I have grown into them, come to like them.

My father, for instance, has this way of answering the phone. “Hellll – o,” he says, putting a heavy accent on the first syllable⁴ and snapping the “o” short. Call me today and you’ll hear “Hellll – o,” just like the old an. Every time I hear myself say it, I feel good.

This new empathy for my father has led me to a startling insight: if I am still resolving my feelings about my father, then when I was a boy my father was still resolving his feelings about his father.

He raised me as a result of and as a reaction to his own dad, which links my son not only to me and my father, but to my father’s father and, I suspect, any number of Harrington fathers before. I imagine that if the phone had rung as the first Harrington stepped of the boat, he’d have answered by saying, “Hellll –o”.

For reasons to profound and too petty to tell, there was a time years ago when my father and I didn’t speak or see each other. I finally gave up my stubbornness and visited unexpectedly. For two days we talked, of everything and nothing. Neither mentioned that we hadn’t seen each other in five years.

I left as depressed⁵ as I’ve ever been, knowing that reconciliation⁶ was impossible. Two days later I got the only letter my father ever sent me. I’m the writer, he’s the milkman. But the letter’s tone and cadence⁷, its emotion and simplicity⁸ might have been my own.

“I know that if I had it to do over again,” he wrote, “I would somehow find more time to spend with you. It seems we never realize this until it’s too late.”

It turned out that as he had watched me walk out the door after our visit – at the instant I was thinking we were hopelessly lost to each other – he was telling himself to stop me, to sit down and talk, that if we didn’t he might never see me again. “But I just let you go,” he wrote.

I realized that his muscles just hadn’t been able to move with the emotion, which is all I ever really needed to know.

Not long ago, Matthew asked me, “sons can grow up to be their daddies, right?” This was no small struggling for insight, and I was careful in my response. “No,” I said, “sons can grow up to be like their daddies in some ways, but they can’t be their daddies. They must be themselves.” Matthew would hear nothing of these subtleties⁹.

“Sons can grow up to be their daddies!” he said defiantly¹⁰. “They can.” I didn’t argue. It made me feel good.

All morning I am anxious. Matthew and I are about to leave Arizona for home, and I am determined¹¹ to do something I have never done.

There is a time in every son’s life when he resents the echoes reminding him that, for all his vaunted individuality, he is his father’s son. But thee should also come a time – as it had for me – when these echoes call out only the understanding that the generations have melded and blurred¹² without threat.

So just before my son and I walk through the gate and onto our plane, I lean over, hug my father and say, “I want you to know that I love you. That I always have.”