J.P. Rennquist, a professional fatherhood coach, and father of three (soon to be four) kids writes today in the Duluth News Tribune, “Fathers with narrow view still had love to give.”
You know those obnoxious “smell like a man” Old Spice commercials with the muscular, improbably masculine spokesmen? I think I’m responsible for them. I might be, anyway. About five years ago I got roped into doing some online consumer research surveys. One of them asked why I wore Old Spice, and I told them it was because it reminded me of my grandpa. That took me back to a memory and a scent frozen in my mind from half a world away.
Rennquist writes contrasting his grandpa’s generation, where kids and dads didn’t mix much, with the trend towards both highly involved dads of this generation when it comes to upper and middle class families and the one in three families grown up without a dad at home, with a much higher percentage among the poor.
I’m convinced that the more remote fathers of previous generations loved their kids as much as the hands-on, Snugli-wearing, diaper-changing dads of today. Maybe they were locked into a narrower idea of what their role was. Of what a man was. Of what a father was.
Which brings me back to my grandfather. He was retired from carpentry and spent his days in an old flannel work shirt sitting in his damp house, tying flies, playing solitaire and reading. If the weather was right, he’d go fishing. He’s the only man who always had time for me from the time I was an infant till the day he died. When I was 22 years old, I studied abroad near Chongqing, China, or “Chung King,” China’s World War II capital, as my grandpa remembered it. There I was, about as far from his tiny house near Otter Creek in Carlton as I could be, when, for a split second, I caught a whiff of him. Of course, it was my musty dorm room, my flannel shirt, and, yes, my Old Spice that smelled like a man that day. Not his.
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