What did you do for Father’s Day?
Saturday night, my dad and I partook in an annual tradition: we went out and got very drunk.
We’re not especially prolific drinkers, but one of his small dreams when I was growing up was for us to share a beer or three when I’d come of age.
So now I indulge him whenever he visits from California.
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Every time I get shitfaced with my old man, I either learn something new about him or am reminded of something that happened between us a long time ago.
As we sat at the bar, I looked across the room into the pub’s open-concept kitchen. Two men no older than 20 were hurrying about, assembling burgers, salads and fish & chips platters. They moved purposefully and said precious little. They were ultra-focused. Neither had much culinary training, as I later found out, but they executed a superbly clean dinner service.
Two decades ago, I worked for my dad at a fast-food restaurant. He (an out-of-work software programmer) bought the place as a change-of-career gambit, which he quickly grew to regret.
My dad wasn’t a generous boss. He didn’t pay me directly for picking up evening and weekend shifts. Instead he accepted to buy me new skates (Mission Pure S300s) and to pay my season fees for high school hockey (about $500, if memory serves). I wound up working for something like $2.25 per hour.
Fortunately I got more out of the experience than either my dad or I expected.
The kitchen taught me about focus.
We were just one metro stop away from the Bell Centre, so I got used to multi-tasking (work the register, flip the burgers, run to the back to get more french fries, dunk them in the deep fryer, place the food on the client’s tray; repeat) before Montreal Canadiens home games. Getting through a lunch or dinner rush without a mistake felt rewarding. I’m not sure if I ever ended up enjoying the work, but I look back on the experience with fondness.
The ability to focus turned out to be a transferrable skill. I didn’t become a better student but was at least able to maintain my grades with less effort. I did become a more diligent athlete and, much later, a decent self-employed businessman.
I don’t expect my son to go to the moon or play in the NHL, but I do hope that he’ll find a medium in which he can develop his focus.
Maybe it’ll be athletics, or music, or art, or cooking, or something else. I’ll probably have as much say on the path he winds up choosing as my dad did with mine.
Which is to say, not a whole lot.