Everything Is Fine

by Vince Granata

My father’s strength used to be difficult for me to understand. As a child, I was never in awe of him physically. Though his three sons would become college athletes, he was not a physically impressive man. My father couldn’t throw a football over the roof of our house, beat me in a forty-yard dash, split logs for our suburban fireplace. He was not the superhero some boys make of their fathers, not one who performed feats of physical strength. But I can’t remember a promise that he ever failed to keep. For hours, he would sit with me in the family room, build elaborate Lego structures, cut balsa wood with an X-Acto knife, construct a model of the great pyramids we painted in glimmering gold. After every childhood basketball game, he took me to the diner, watched me eat pancakes topped with mounds of powdered sugar, showed me how to make a saltshaker balance on one of its edges, held magically by a few coarse grains. When I was a shy new student at high school—slow to make friends, alone on many Friday nights—we would watch reruns of Iron Chef, assemble our own modest culinary masterpieces—sandwiches layered with cold cuts and cheese. My father didn’t teach me how to bait a fishing hook, how to throw a strike, how to fix a leaking pipe. He didn’t take me up mountains or show me how to carve my way down a ski slope. No, his strength was not the kind that inspired me, that moved me through heroic awe. His strength was a kind I learned to take for granted, the quiet strength o...