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A Hallmark Card Just Doesn't Do The Trick

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By D'ANN LAWRENCE WHITE | The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 16, 2007

Brandon - Brandon - Along with about 20 other sons and daughters, I spent a chunk of my Sunday afternoon standing in the greeting card aisle at Walgreens in Bloomingdale perusing the selection of Father's Day cards.

Like always, I welled up at the sentimental Hallmark Celebration offerings and made a fool of myself laughing out loud at the company's Shoebox Greeting cards.

The guy standing next to me looked as if he was ready to call 911, so I tried explaining to him why I was busting a gut.

I showed him the cartoon on the card. "You see there's a father and son at the beach looking at this dead seagull and the kid asks the dad what happened to the bird. The father tells him that it died and went to heaven. And the kid looks down at the dead bird and asks his dad, 'Did God throw him back down?'"

I burst into laughter all over again.

The fellow customer just looked at me and walked away, leaving me to marvel at the subjectivity of humor. Obviously, the person who wrote the greeting card and that person's boss thought it was funny enough, or it never would have ended up on the greeting card rack at Walgreens.

Despite the tears and guffaws, I left the store empty-handed. How can some stranger back at Hallmark headquarters in Kansas City possibly summarize my feelings about my dad?

My sister and I were talking on the phone recently about that very subject — our dad. She lives in St. Louis, about a mile from my parents, and gets to see them a lot more than I do. We were discussing the fact that neither of us knows my dad as well as we would like.

My father wasn't around a whole lot when we were growing up. He was a vice president for an international insurance brokerage firm that required him to constantly travel around the world.

Frankly, my younger brother and I were convinced the whole insurance brokerage thing was a front and that our father was really a spy for the CIA. After all, he was former Army Intelligence, serving during the Korean War; his biggest client was McDonnell Douglas, a major American aerospace manufacturer and defense contractor based in St. Louis before merging with The Boeing Co. in 1997; and he bore a marked resemblance to Robert Wagner in the '60s TV series, "It Takes a Thief," in which Wagner worked for a secret government agency called the SIA.

My dad would return home from an overseas trips carrying one of those black leather attaché cases with the combination locks, where we were certain top-secret documents were stashed.

To this day, my dad has never emphatically stated one way or the other whether he was a secret agent.

No, dad wasn't around as much as other fathers in the neighborhood when we were youngsters. By the time we were old enough to engage in real conversations with him, we weren't all that interested in hanging around the house getting to know dad better. And because my dad tended to be quiet and contemplative, downright distracted at times, starting a conversation with him was like pulling teeth.

But after my sister and I ended our phone conversation, I began looking back on our relationship through the years. No, we don't have the kind of bond where I feel comfortable calling him out of the blue to talk about whatever's on my mind.

However, now that I think back on it, despite all his travels, my dad was on hand for every landmark event in my life, as well as a few he'd probably rather forget, and his presence made all the difference in the world to me.

He apparently abandoned his missions to foil the plot of some devious KGB agent long enough to attend my figure-skating recitals and high school graduation. He also kept his promise and was there when I turned 21, taking me out for my first drink. He was front-and-center at my college graduation and flew to New England on the pretense of a business trip to make sure I was settled in at my first real job.

He picked me up and carried me in the house when I appeared at the garage door at age 8, wearing one white sneaker and one red sneaker. A sharp rock had pierced the rubber sole of one shoe, sharply cutting my foot. My blood had soaked the shoe, turning it red.

And he was there for darker moments of my life.

He held my hand when the doctor assembled our family in a hospital room and solemnly told us my 14-year-old little brother wouldn't live through the night.

And he rushed to Columbia, Mo., when the police called to tell him his daughter, studying journalism at the University of Missouri, was at the university medical center, a victim of a serial rapist.

No offense to Hallmark or American Greetings, but the sentiments on their cards seemed so hackneyed and indifferent when compared with what I was feeling, what I wanted to say to this man.

You see, my dad, now in his 70s, has cancer. The man who used to begin his day with a brisk, five-mile walk followed by 18 holes of golf barely has the strength these days to walk from the bedroom to the family room.

The last time I saw him, I couldn't even give him a hug because the chemotherapy and radiation had weakened his immune system to such a point that he had to wear a surgical mask and we had to keep at arm's length to avoid contaminating him.

So I walked out of Walgreens without a card and, instead, stopped by my church and began a Father's Day Novena, a nine-day prayer, for my dad. Then I made a donation to the Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in his honor.

A prayer for my dad and the hope of ending the suffering of future dads: That's my Father's Day gift.

Columnist D'Ann Lawrence White can be reached at (813) 657-4524 or dlwhite@tampatrib.com.

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