Father's Day: Thank You!

My dad owned an auto repair shop with his brothers and his dad for the first half of my life at home.  He taught auto mechanics to high school students for the second half.  He always had a shop in our garage, and the smell of a shop makes me think of my dad to this day.

When I went away to college for the first time, there was an auto shop between my apartment and the campus that I walked past every day on my way to class, right before hopping a fence and cutting through a cemetery.  It was usually closed in the morning on my way in, but open and lively when I passed it on my way home in the late afternoon or early evening.  One night after passing the shop, I wrote this poem for my dad, upon returning to my first apartment after leaving my childhood home.

Missing My Dad

 Walking by garages in the twilight,

weathered box buildings, 

lit with florescent bulbs.

Small black pools of engine fluids

staining cement floors;

red steel tool shelves

cluttered with contrivances of the trade.

And the unmistakable scent

of motor oil and men's sweat

intermingling in the autumn air.


I fall in love with men with dirty hands

because of you, Dad.

And to my husband, a man with constantly dirty hands, I can only say:

Thank you so very, very much, on this Father's Day, for making me a mother.  

Thank you -forever- for giving me this:

The brand new father is behind the lens of his very first Father's Day gift, 
his new Nikon, received a month before the birth of his first child, and well worth the early gifting.