Thanks For Being Here - Susannah Meadows Honors her Dad

Kelly Corrigan (0:00)

Hi, everyone, welcome to Thanks for Being Here, a short weekly pod to remind us of the many essential and beautiful ways we affect one another. Every Sunday, I'll read a submission from a listener of Kelly Corrigan Wonders. Could be wedding vows, or a bat mitzvah toast, a eulogy, or a retirement speech. We believe this is probably the loveliest way to tap into our better selves and remember our highest values. We encourage you to share this podcast each week with one person you love, maybe someone you miss and need to bring closer, someone you want to feel your appreciation or admiration or both.

This is Thanks For Being Here.

This week's Thanks For Being Here is going to be one of my favorites, I'm sure of it. It's from a woman named Susannah Meadows who is a great friend of mine. I love her top to bottom, backwards and forwards. I love her because she's a wonderful human being and a great friend, but she is also a beautiful writer in two ways. One, I just like her sentences and her word choice. The two is, I like how honest she is. This is something Susannah wrote in honor of her father for The New York Times. It's called What My Dad Gave Me.

My father gave me his freckly skin and like him, I had melanoma. He gave me asthma and protruding elbows that are identical to his. He gave me reddish hair that's kindly reluctant to go gray. He gave me an aversion to drinking by not having one himself. He did not give me the seat next to him at the San Diego Chargers game. He had season tickets when I was a kid, but I only found out about it years later. He gave me the ability to talk to anyone because I couldn't stand the awkward silences that he provided. He gave me really nice houses to grow up in, but we moved a lot for his work and things never seemed to be going well, so he gave me financial anxiety too.

He gave me the tools to withstand a sexist world. He would say, Hillary looks ugly in her pantsuits and her voice. Women don't belong on the golf course.. This was my exposure therapy. He gave it generously. He didn't give me a response when I was little and watching a baseball game on TV with him. Why, I wanted to know, did the umpire call a strike when the batter didn't swing his bat? He couldn't be bothered to explain.. Some things I took from him. His Fox News when I set up his cable, copies of love letters he'd written to a woman who wasn't my mom that I found when I was helping him move. I gave him things too. I gave him disappointment when I was born a girl. Then I gave him grandsons. He's proud of the work I do, especially the fact that I edit David Brooks.

I once gave him something really nice. He was forced to sell his signed baseball collection when he was having financial trouble. I wrote about it in The Times and the fact that he got all the signatures when he was 14 and a bat boy for the Chicago White Sox. The White Sox front office contacted me, asking if my dad would throw out the first pitch at a game. I took him to Chicago and at 85, he took to the mound. I didn't give him a hard time about missing the plate.

I think he thought that if he'd had boys, fatherhood would have been different. Instead, he had three daughters. But of course, gender has nothing to do with anything. He could have tossed the baseball with any of us. His limitations were his own, as our limitations always are. He's 92 now. He's lost a lot of things. My mom, all of his old friends, and since a stroke, the ability to read his beloved Wall Street Journal. But also some of his loneliness, now that he's in an assisted living place. Access to his beloved Scotch too.

He overextended himself, and I sold my mom's diamond ring to pay for things he needed. The last of it covered the cost of having her body cremated. In the end, he didn't get whatever he was chasing, the money, the success. But he's happier now than at any other time since I've known him. I found him the place he lives now, where he has friends. That's the last thing I gave him, and maybe the best thing. He's nicer to be around. I'm sure having no Fox News and no alcohol helps. When he says things about what a woman can't do, literally, still, I joke about please joining me in the 21st century, and he laughs. He told me recently that he thinks about me all the time. I don't think he thought of me at all when I was a kid. I can't remember ever chatting with him about my day. When I visit, he responds as if he's been bestowed a great honor. He tells me that it's incredible that I'm there, and I can tell he means it.