Male vs Female Bonding

After a surprisingly enjoyable 12-day visit, my Dad flew home to Cincinnati yesterday.

On Friday, we built a sunburst arbor to top a floating trellis along our back fence. I’ve had the wood since August, but have been overwhelmed each time I tried to convert my drawn plan into cut wood. Dad’s done housing rehab for 27 years and showed me lots of great carpenter tricks. Put the 2x6’s in place on the corner posts and just draw the angles for the sunburst on the top edge, use old lipstick to figure out where to drill peg holes in the arbor, and bend a flexible piece of stripping to create the sunburst arch cut line. When we finished, Dad commented that this will be a wonderful memory for him: we confronted a woodpile and conquered it through ingenuity, cooperation, and brute strength.

While I deeply appreciated the help, for me it’s mostly something off my to-do list. I thought about how much guys seem to bond through shared events, whether in real life or in watching an event on television. Jrex and Dad kept discussing a fabulous football game they watched 2 years ago. For them that game counted as a bonding memory. For me the more meaningful memories from his visit are the conversations we had: what forgiveness looks like for him, our differing experiences of his mother and aunt, and memories of my Mom (his ‘beautiful wife Margaret’).



We visited family friends who now live in DC. On the drive home, Jrex worked on grant writing in the back seat. Dad and I started playing a game we used to do when I was little. At bedtime my brother, sister, and I picked three objects (trying to make them as different as possible). Then Dad wove them into a story that always included the three of us having an adventure. For the first story I selected, "an iron, a floating castle, and a cube". Dad told a story of me as a 4 year old playing in a stream behind Grossmama Heine's house. I used an iron bar I found to rescue a floating chess piece which I proudly displayed on a Rubix cube. It was fun to be reminded how creative my Dad can be and how much we crack each other up with verbal sparring. I'll treasure that memory. He's welcome to treasure the trellis.