Father’s Day: a reflection with ice cream.

I write this sitting next to my grill making dinner for my family. My kid is taking a bath. My honesty is flowing as smooth as my third beer on my empty stomach.

I’ve had a close to perfect father’s day with bacon and sprinklers and ice-cream, which makes me feel really proud of the life I’ve built for myself. But father’s day also causes lament for a relationship so strained in my own life.

Sometime around the age my son is now (5) I tried my first beer. I was standing on the sidewalk outside of the apartment we lived in. My dad was standing there with a budweiser in his hand, and I asked him what he was drinking. He said beer, and then handed me the bottle. I remember drinking it, and promptly spitting it out. Then he laughed, took the bottle back, took another drink, got in his car, and drove away. I’ve told that story before, usually as a joke of simpler times, but the joke is just a mask for how painful it is.

My dad is an addict.

In my earliest memories, he isn’t present. When he is, the memories are toxic. My parents solidified their relationship sometime around 6 or 7 years old, but it still wasn’t healthy and there were plenty of comings and goings — many of those caused by substance abuse.

Although I can’t quite remember the age, sometime around 10 he sobered up. He relapsed one or two times in the next couple of years, but after that really tried to stay straight and narrow. Though sober, he would still struggle with anger issues that created unstable pre-teen and teenage years. Living in that environment from early childhood already made one thing certain in my kid brain: dad was not a safe person to be around or talk to.

In my late 20's it came to light he was having an affair, and soon after he relapsed. On the day my own son was born my parents were pretending to be in a normal happy marriage while secretly living apart, which I discovered about a month after my son was born.

Now, somehow, my parents are still together. My dad is sober, only due to a clear conversation in the last 6 months in which the consequences of his relapse were laid out. Today, I spent an hour on the phone with my dad. We talked about politics, and the economy, and quarantine life. My dad is easy to talk to, and never meets a stranger. I just don’t ever know what to talk to him about. We’ve never really connected, and I struggle with the comparison game of what healthy or “normal” relationships with parents might be like, or of what could have been if he had just…

Do I really need to finish that sentence? It almost doesn’t seem worth it because wondering about the what if will never change the right now.

And right now there is ice cream. I don’t even know if it’s true, but I think my dad loves ice cream. I remember often going to the ice cream shop in the small town we grew up in after baseball or soccer games, or after Wednesday night church.

And I think his dad loved ice cream. His father died when I was very young, but I do remember his dad taking us to piggly wiggly (southern grocery chain) on the weekend. Cold and frozen food was still kept in a giant walk in that people just went in and out of — it was it’s own section. We would buy Neapolitan in a cardboard package. They would bag it in a brown paper bag that fit the ice cream carton perfectly. And then he’d scoop it out back at the house, but I never wanted the strawberry flavor in mine.

Two years ago for father’s day my wife got me an ice cream maker, which made me remember those brown paper bags and ice cream shops. As a kid I always thought my dad like the weirdest flavors — peach or pistachio (now my favorites too). So when they visited not long after father’s day weekend two years ago, I made a batch of peach ice cream with fresh Carolina peaches from a local farm. I packed it in a container, and wrapped it in a brown paper bag with a note about my memories of his dad and ice cream.

This weekend my son and I made ice cream. I call it “Saturday morning cartoons” and it’s basically vanilla with cereal pieces. This afternoon we scooped some out into cones and sat in the carport and I watched him make a mess of his face and hands and he was so happy.

Peach. Pistachio. Saturday morning cartoons. No matter the flavor, on a hot summer day, it helps melt the past away.