It’s grey over Memorial Park this morning, a thin drizzle that hasn’t decided if it’s committing to rain. The geese don’t seem to mind. The ganders are out in full force right now — necks low, eyes sharp, putting their whole bodies between their goslings and anything that moves too fast. Watch them long enough and you’ll see one charge something three times his size without hesitation. That’s not performance. That’s instinct doing exactly what it evolved to do.
It won’t last. By the time the goslings are nine or ten weeks old, that fierce vigilance starts to loosen. By next spring, the parents have moved on to a new clutch, and the offspring that once couldn’t leave their sight are simply… independent. No conversation happens. No falling out. It’s biology, clean and indifferent, scaled exactly to how much protection is needed and not a day more.
Humans don’t get that mercy. Our estrangements aren’t governed by hormone cycles and fledgling windows — they’re built out of things far messier: words said or never said, pain misdirected at the wrong person, distance that calcifies before anyone notices it happening. And sometimes a relationship doesn’t get to taper at all. Sometimes it’s cut off mid-sentence, and the people left behind spend years trying to find an ending that never naturally arrived.
That’s part of what makes today complicated for a lot of people who’ll never say so out loud.
The History of the Day
Father’s Day, as it happens, wasn’t always the institution it now seems. It traces to Sonora Smart Dodd, a woman in Spokane, Washington, who in 1909 sat in a Mother’s Day sermon and thought of her own father — a Civil War veteran who raised six children alone after his wife died — and wondered why no one set a day aside for men like him.
It took far longer to become official than most people assume. Woodrow Wilson tried to formalize it in 1916; Congress balked, worried it would become commercialized. They weren’t wrong to worry — they just lost the argument anyway. Calvin Coolidge backed it in 1924. It wasn’t until 1972, under Richard Nixon, barely over fifty years ago, that it became a permanent national holiday at all.
Which is its own kind of irony: a day born out of one daughter’s grief, fought over for sixty years by people who could already see the greeting-card aisle coming, now mostly observed through a phone screen.
The holiday used to look like burnt coffee delivered to bed and a tie nobody needed, a backyard grill, a card with a crooked crayon signature.
Now it’s increasingly a feed — a performance of gratitude staged for an audience, sometimes more about being seen having a good father than about the father himself.
None of that is a judgment on anyone celebrating today sincerely. It’s just worth noticing what got swapped out along the way.
For everyone for whom today isn’t simple — who lost a father, who never had the one they needed, who’s estranged for reasons too complicated to fit in a caption, who wanted to raise a child and didn’t get the chance — the geese might have something to offer after all. Not an answer. Just a reminder that protection and love don’t require a clean ending to have been real while they lasted.
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