Here are about half a dozen of the wonderful things I remember about my father.
Watching the original airing of Victory at Sea on the black and white TV in our basement, eating popcorn, while my father told me about what it was like during World War II when he was in the Navy. He seemed to know every detail of every battle and there was no father who knew any more. Admiral Halsey didn't know any more as far as I could tell.

I remember walking a mile from our house in Silver Spring, Maryland, to the drug store to buy the Sunday New York Times so he could read something called The Book Review. On the way there, he would often talk about his days working his way through Williams College, a superb college in western Massachusetts, washing dishes in a fraternity house that did not admit Jews. He said he wasn't bitter about it at all. He was just happy to have a job in The Great Depression and send himself to a good school. Much, much later, I remember having lunch with my father in The White House Mess when my Pop was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and I was a speech writer for Richard Nixon. We would talk about how bad things looked for RN and Pop would say that as worried as I was, I would live through it and go on to better days. Sometimes I would ask him for a statistic for a speech and I would tell him he should only bother to look it up if he didn't have anything better to do. He would always ask me, "What do you think I have to do that's more important than helping my only son?"

Then, much later after that, when the stock market crashed and I was terrified about money, my father said to me that no matter what, he and my mother would always take care of me, and we would work on it together, whatever it was. This was exactly what he used to say when I was a kid and we were raking leaves or trying to build a model of the battleship Missouri.

I finally remember when he was in the hospital in 1999 with heart disease and I went to a tiny bit of trouble to get the nurses to take out his tracheal tube and then I brought him a chocolate milkshake. "That's the best meal I've ever had," he said. "Eat them while you can." As you can see, I do.

Finally, I remember sitting with him after the doctors said his situation was hopeless and they were going to take him off life support. He was in a coma and I took his hand and said, "Pop, you're going to see Mom." My mother had passed away two and a half years earlier. My sister and I each held his hand until he did go and see Mom and we were left without a father.

Today is Father's Day. If you have a father who is still living, if you are incredibly, unbelievably lucky enough to have a father you can still talk to and hug and sit down with for a meal and maybe a chocolate milkshake, be incredibly happy and grateful and spend every second you can with your father. If you are a father and still can talk to your kids and hug them and build a model battleship with them and rake leaves with them, keep doing it. You cannot ever know, not even have a clue, how important you are to them.

If your relationship with your father isn't great, start making it great right now. Call him. Spend time with him. Listen to him and don't just ask him to buy you things. If your relationship with your kids isn't great, start working on it right now. There is no more important task you'll have on this earth than being a good father. This is what you were put on earth to do.

It's Father's Day. It has very little to do with buying a tie or golf balls or taking Dad to brunch. It has everything to do with a simple lesson that I learned more than forty-three years ago from a President and father who died too young. "Here on earth," he said, "God's work must truly be our own."

Happy Father's Day.