Father Dear Father

No one can ever be like him.

- Heera Nawaz

The above words reverberate in my mind every year when “Father’s Day” is around the corner, as the words remind me of the deep, selfless and unconditional love that most fathers have for their children. It takes me back to a vivid and poignant flashback when I was an impressionable third-grader living in the busy bustling city of New York, also known as the “Big Apple”. It was the year when Martin Luther King Jr., one of the best known civil rights activists, was assassinated barely four years after he had won the coveted Nobel Peace Prize, being the youngest recipient before Malala Yousafzai to do so.

However, though King was applauded for his contribution for the rights of Black Americans, I admired him more for being a doting family man, a responsible husband to his now late wife, Mrs Coretta King, and a responsible father keen on practising what he preached to his minor, impressionable children.

Since Father’s Day is now a big celebration on the third Sunday of June, it took a gutsy grateful woman, Sonora Smart Dodd, to initiate the drive to have a day celebrating fathers, it being formally and officially declared by U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1972.

Wade Boggs put it very succinctly when she said, “Anyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a ‘dad’, and that’s why I call you dad because you are so special to me. You taught me the game and you taught me to play it right.”