Everybody’s Different (Even Fathers)

My dad — who was handsomer than your dad, I will fight you — and me

I’ve been thinking this week about a first-class two-part episode from the third season of Grey’s Anatomy, a show that’s made a habit — almost a fetish — of noodling on a theme from two or three angles. Pretty much every week, the medical drama uses its ensemble of surgeons and the patients they treat as lenses to train lights of varying intensity on the topic of the day. And in the case of “Six Days,” the topic is fathers: strong fathers, weak fathers, absent fathers, fathers who might have been but never were.

I’ve been thinking about that episode because I’ve been trying to imagine what it must have been like to be my own father, 24 years old and working in the Louisiana oil fields, when the news broke that I’d be making my entrance. Sure, he and my mom had thought about starting a family, had been looking forward to having a kid. 

“But I didn’t know the first dad-gum thing about raising one,” says my dad, who still t…