This Sunday will be my son’s third Father’s Day and one of my own greatest joys as a dad has been watching him as a dad.
Truth be told, I actually got a glimpse of my son as a father a decade ago when a line of poetry by William Wordsworth – “The Child is father to the Man” – played out when I was visited him, then 27 years old, in New York City.
I embraced this turnabout as happily as I embraced him at the airport. In fact, his surprise greeting at baggage claim was the beginning of our role reversals.
I had planned to take the subway from JFK and meet my son at his apartment in Lower Manhattan. Worried about me navigating the subway system, he covertly trekked out to meet me. A very father-like thing.
This played out again and again the rest of my visit: my son insisted on carrying my luggage; gave me his bed; lent me the jacket off his back when the night air turned cold.
The most dramatic way my Child was father to this Man occurred when, in similar fashion to how I used to take him to Ventura’s now shuttered H.P. Wright Library, he took me to the venerable New York Public Library.
On the way there, I was jostled in a rugby-like scrum getting on a crowded subway car and my right index finger got sliced open, as if by a long stroke of a potato feeler, by the closing door. Firm pressure with a napkin largely stanched the bleeding.
We exited at the next stop and my son located a pharmacy and bought Band-Aids and tape. But when I removed the napkin the red floodgates reopened.
“I’m taking you to get stitches right now,” the Child-turned-father-of-the-Man demanded.
At Urgent Care, my son signed me in and did all the necessary paperwork. He even accompanied me into the treatment room as had I with him numerous times long ago.
The first anesthetic injection made me curse and the second was even worse, bringing tears to my eyes. The whole while my son held my other hand and told me how brave I was being. He then distracted me with laughter – kept me in stitches, if you will – as I received 18 sutures.
To be honest, the painful mishap was worth the experience of seeing this side of my boy-turned-man.
For the remainder of my visit he kept the tables turned. He changed my bandage. He focused our itinerary on me. He led and I followed.
At a jazz club one evening, my son and I arrived early and were rewarded with the best table in the joint. Moments before the performance began, however, the manager asked if we would consider changing places with an elderly couple too feeble physically to sit on tall stools in the rear of the room.
Because my son and I are tall, the manager felt we could still see the show but emphasized: “You really don’t need to. I just wanted to ask.”
Without a beat’s pause, my son replied with enthusiastic sincerity: “Of course they can have our seats.”
We went from first row to worst row – and I could not have been happier or more proud.
Wordsworth’s poem also includes this stanza: “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky.”
So, too, does my heart leap up beholding the kind of Man my Child has become, and the rainbow of a father Greg is to little Jayden and his big sister Amara.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.