Happy Fathers Day!

Today is Fathers Day in Bolivia.

I began my day with a blissfully muddy 25-minute bike ride to school (Fathers Day and the end of the rainy season still coincide), past cows and corn, with a singing first-grader seated on the metal rack behind me. I was also the happy recipient of a set of very nice tiny drawings on tiny scraps of paper, with tiny flowers.

There is some commercialization of Fathers Day here, but beyond a few ads for neckties and dress shirts it isn’t much. In some years my family and I end up being in the U.S. in June, when Dads’ Day is celebrated up there, and I get two! But this year one will be enough.

When school is out I am waiting at the door. You can tell something is different. Some of the other fathers have also managed to escape from work, sneaking into the usual crowd of mothers who congregate around the muddy entrance.

My six-year-old daughter and I head into the city with an afternoon’s worth of plans ahead of us. We lunch on pizza at the restaurant with the plastic playground equipment that she has played on since she was a toddler and which she has now nearly outgrown. Then we are off to the movies, a rare father/daughter treat for us.

The center of Cochabamba is dotted with signs of a special day. Many tiny hands reach up to grasp large ones as they walk down the street. A man I know who runs a restaurant stops his work to chat with me a while and then announces he is off to rejoin his elderly father at a table in the corner.

Fathers Day is a funny holiday. You start out in life with it being about your own father. In my family, when I was little, we marked both Mothers Day and Fathers Day by getting up early and scotch taping a fistful of homemade cards to my parents’ bedroom door.

For me there were a number of years when Fathers Day was just a time of hard remembrance. My father died 20 years ago next Friday. But soon after I became a parent in my own right, three times, and I became the lucky recipient of little notes written by little hands.

At the movies, after carefully studying the posters for what was playing, we settled on a new movie called Hotel for Dogs. We laughed so hard we almost peed our pants. In the movie the young boy who saves stray canines across downtown Los Angeles (my hometown) also makes inventions to keep them happy. The best was the one that let the dogs watch films of a road whizzing by, while sticking their heads out of disconnected car door windows and having fans blow air in their faces. We liked that.

We agreed that our dogs would have liked the movie as much as we did. But dogs aren’t allowed into theaters here. At least I’ve never tried.

Happy Fathers Day to all our readers who are fathers, in Bolivia, and everywhere else.