When I hear stories of fathers and sons having what sounds to me like unusually close and frank relationships, I wonder with some regret if I could have been (or still could be) closer with my own father, and if the distance that I sometimes perceive between us is basically my fault for having been a prick when I was a teenager (like all teenage boys--annoying pricks with rare moments of charm). Don't get me wrong: we are in no way estranged and we talk on the phone fairly frequently and he is way above-beyond-the-call generous toward me when I have needed help, but there is a distance that doesn't seem crossable because we are so different in so many ways.
The differences are so many as to be overwhelming to list, but I think the root of it is a very different set of expectations and interests that we had as a result of our particular generations and upbringings. My dad was a child of the early years of the Baby Boom and a son of the first generation of our family that were not farmers since their migration to the United States. He is not formally educated beyond fulfilling the expectation that he finish high school, which he did but probably didn't relish it much from a learning stand-point. Though he is of the generation that produced the counter-culture during the 1960s, he did not participate in any of that. Though he was of draft age during the Vietnam War, he did not get drafted nor did he enlist in the military. He went to work in a cheese factory at age 18 and he still works there now at age 63. He married young, had a son, got divorced, married again, got divorced again. Certainly there were some years of tumult and distress in there, but he stayed on what I suspect seemed to be an ingrained course, that he would be an honest, hard-working man, earn a living and raise his son as best as he could. I don't know if he ever really questioned or became discontented with what I sometimes perhaps unfairly think of as his "lot in life."
I am very different. While I do not in any way believe that I am inherently "smarter" than my dad, I am much more of an intellectual. I do not mean that in a snobbish, elitist way, but in the sense that I have always had drive toward learning and information and analysis and new or revised ways of thinking which I don't think interest him nearly as much, and I have always been a huge reader since my earliest memories (and my earliest memories go back to toddler-hood when I'd look at the words in the books and wonder what they were). Also, I was always very discontented (I might have inherited that from my mother, if such things pass genetically), and always dreaming of something better and more exotic than what my real life offered. Some tangible results of this: I was the first kid ever on either side of my family to attend and graduate from college; I studied abroad for a semester, again a first; I moved away from Wisconsin (permanently, as it turns out--left for college before my eighteenth birthday and have never been back other than for short visits); I've moved from job to job. While my dad has had the same employer his entire adult life, I have had several, including a period of self-employment with my restaurant and some dark lulls of complete unemployment.
I am 38 years old and will turn 39 in August. My dad turned 39 in 1986. When my dad turned 39, he had been married twice, had owned several homes, had a 15-year-old son and had been employed in the same job for two decades. At age 39, while he was in no way rich or even middle class anymore (it was people like him who were most betrayed by the conservative ascendancy that solidified with Reagan), he wasn't begging money off his own father. Several times since the disaster of my failed restaurant and my period of under-employment after that, I have needed and received bail-outs from him. The other day, I sent him a Father's Day card. On the same day, he sent me a card with a check for $150 in it, just as a little buy-something-nice-for-yourself gift. It makes me feel like a loser. My father's father helped defeat fascism's conquest of the world; my own father has been an exemplar of stability and integrity and hard work and decent-heartedness. At almost 39, I am what I thought of, at age 15, as "an old fucker," and what do I have to show for it? No, I'm not really asking that. I do have a lot to show for what my life has been, and a lot to be proud of, and a lot to be thankful for. But my path has been so completely unlike my father's that I don't think he can really understand it anymore than I can understand his.
There's also a fact about me that is well known to all my readers and online friends and meatspace friends but that is not known to my father, and which has been more or less easy to keep unspoken because I don't live anywhere near him (though it's probably obvious from space). He doesn't (as far as I know) know about my online presence, but I have gambled with the secret that I keep from my dad for a long time. A Google search would easily pull up some evidence.
I know a lot of dads who read my posts, so happy Father's Day to y'all.
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I'm glad you can see the "value" of your own path. Happy Father's day.