These Are the Tales I Tell of My Father

My dad was a Thanksgiving hero with his loaf of cranberry bread

My father is still very much alive. He is 80, overweight, and much slower than he used to be. He forgets things frequently and sometimes snaps at the people he loves.

My father is alive, and yet sometimes I find myself cherishing stories of my father from my childhood as if remembering someone who is already gone.

I tell these stories of my father to my children. I want them to know what their grandfather was like as my dad. The man they see in his reading chair is much grumpier and harder to understand than the man who loved me with all his might when I was young.

One of these sweet tales of my father starts on a cold November day in Illinois, just before Thanksgiving.

At the time, one of my favorite books was Cranberry Thanksgiving, by Harry Devlin and Wende Devlin. It’s a classic 1970’s New England Thanksgiving tale about a secret recipe for cranberry bread and a surprise guest at a Thanksgiving table.

I still have the book today, and I swear I can smell my childhood bedroom when I see some of its illustrations.

My elementary school class was having a Thanksgiving potluck the Monday before Thanksgiving. I wanted to bake the cranberry bread recipe from the back of that book to bring to my class party.

That Sunday night, my dad helped me measure the ingredients and bake that cranberry bread in our tiny kitchen. My dad wasn’t much of a baker. In fact, I don’t remember him making anything in our kitchen aside from this day we baked the cranberry bread together. But he was never one to give up an opportunity to spend time with his daughter.

Early the next morning, my dad waited for me in the car in our driveway, running the heat for a few minutes so I would be more comfortable on our drive to school.

I was walking out to the car through our open garage door, proudly carrying the glass loaf pan containing that cranberry bread, when I tripped. The bread went flying, and the pan shattered on our driveway.

My dad came running out to comfort me, but it was clear there was no way to salvage that cranberry bread. We were already late for school. My dad convinced me to hop in the car and leave the shattered glass and crumbs of bread all over our driveway.

I sobbed all the way to school about that cranberry bread. I didn’t want to show up empty handed to my class party, and I was devastated that our hard work had been in vain.

Hours passed, and my tears dried. I spent my morning doing whatever an 8 year old does at school the Monday before Thanksgiving. But as my classmates and I pushed our desks into a long table to prepare for our afternoon Thanksgiving feast, my father appeared in the doorway of my classroom.

In his arms was a new loaf of cranberry bread, fresh from the oven.

My father had dropped me off at school that morning, returned to clean up the shattered glass in our driveway, and then called in to his office to take off from work. He had driven to the grocery store to buy new ingredients for that cranberry bread, which included exotic things like grated orange peel and frozen cranberries.

And then my dad had baked a new loaf of that cranberry bread alone in our kitchen.

My dad could have easily just gone to work that day. I would have survived my Thanksgiving party without that bread. He could even have stopped by the grocery store, bought a loaf of bread, and dropped it off for me at school to bring to my party.

Except that wasn’t what my dad did.

My dad’s act of love was to follow every step of that cranberry bread recipe with his own hands. He couldn’t let our work together stay smashed on the asphalt of our cold driveway. He couldn’t let his daughter cry at school about a wasted effort and a shattered loaf pan. He had to make it right.

As a parent myself now, there are times when I wonder if these acts of love from my father were not all good for me. Perhaps I never learned to accept disappointment as I should have, because my father was always there to make things right. But I choose not to see these acts that way. I choose to see them simply as love.

I choose to remember my father’s new loaf of cranberry bread as an act of fierce, selfless love that I only hope I can replicate sometimes for my own children.

I reflect on this story often because I don’t want to let it go.

My father still loves me deeply, and he loves my two boys. But he doesn’t often get up from his reading chair these days. He lashes out at my mother if she interrupts him. He is riddled with anxiety about tasks like renewing his drivers’ license and paying his phone bills on time.

He is 80, and he now meets the definition of “old” that I feared for so long as a child.

I’m aware now more than ever of the limited time I have left with my father. That’s why stories from the past are so special to me, because in these stories my dad is not stuck in his reading chair studying anxiously for his drivers’ test.

In these stories, my dad is a hero with a loaf of cranberry bread.

Special thanks to Christopher Robin for his astute editing advice. And for reading my story when he should have been scrubbing his bathroom floor.

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If you enjoyed this story, here are two more pieces I’ve published in Age of Empathy: