Father's Day

My graphic design business was a year old in 1975 when my father paid his one and only visit. Why had I chosen this day to invite him for a lesson in preparing graphic design for printing?

This was no time to be tutoring anyone, much less my father. Revisions had been arriving all week for the reading program that my two business partners and I were designing, and I was taking a big risk trying to teach my father a new job. What would he think of my office, or the work we did, or my partners? Would he roll his eyes at the macramé plant holders dangling in the window and the Tampax on the toilet tank? I wanted him to be proud of me, and of my new venture. I didn't want him to think we were just three girls playing at being in business.

I had been shocked when, after 28 years as a dedicated math teacher and administrator in Newark, my father retired. He was 52—a damn good educator, so people said. I thought he was too young to step down. When people asked why he'd stopped working so early, he told them he'd had enough of the racial strife in Newark's North Ward. There was truth in that, but I suspected the bigger reason, the one he wasn't saying, was that he needed to stay home and nurse my mother through the later stages of muscular dystrophy. He seemed to step into this role without a second thought. I felt the horror of it, yet secretly rejoiced because as long as he was doing it, I wouldn't have to.

As nervous as I was, the idea of my father's visit excited me. I couldn't remember a time since early childhood that I'd had him to myself without my mother around. Like everyone who knew my

parents, I saw them as inseparable. Except as a helper, there was no room for anyone else in their set of two, not even my sister and me. I was surprised when my