Five o’clock and the front door opened. In he came, home from work, black briefcase in hand. You all dashed across the room, “Daddy’s home!” to cling to his arms and legs like little primates. “Did you bring me any candy?”
Was he wearing the trenchcoat you adopted for your own winter coat in college? Did he wear a hat? Somehow a hat, tweed, with a tiny feather in the band and a narrow brim, sits somewhere in your memory, maybe from an earlier year and his trips for the Navy through the very northern mid-west.
From his pocket or that mid-century briefcase, hard, square, silver clasps that popped up, his last name embossed in white on a black plastic plate (a briefcase that still sits in his bedroom), he brought out mints or gum, whatever he had left over from what he picked up at lunch.
Ah, the joy! Daddy home, a treat, the evening, a new part of the day! How many times did this scene repeat? You feel as if it took place everyday, but for how long? Two days in a row? A week? A season? Intermittently? Children have no sense of time. He always brought a little something from a trip, the left-over mints, an empty airplane-sized bottle of Jack, a funny little pewter monkey from the airplane gift shop whose goofy expression he said reminded you of you, a story about people or things he saw.
The Wuthering Mind 
My father had a briefcase like that too. One clasp had a J, the other a P. I’m sure it’s still at the house somewhere, among all of Mom’s hoarded clutter. I would like to claim it, but since those are my brother’s initials as well, I’m going to tell him that if he has memories of the briefcase, he can keep it. For now. I honestly don’t think he’s smart enough to outlive me, but you never know.
And like your father, mine always brought home gifts. Other than the Puerto Rico assignment he went on in 1971, which took him away for what felt to me like a very long time, the gifts were always small things: the packet of peanuts from his flight, or something like that. He traveled a lot when we lived in San Antonio and I ended up with a lot of heart-shaped coffee stirrers and honey nut peanuts. Somewhere at my parent’s house though, are the gifts he brought me from Puerto Rico: a bamboo cup and two porcelain coqui frogs. Next time I’m out there, I need to see if I can find them in all the clutter. He also brought me some Puerto Rican toothpaste and a cane sugar lump, but of course those didn’t last long.
I’m still a gift-giver in my father’s tradition. Cake, cookies or kolaches at the office? I always nip some for Dan. Came across something cool on Amazon? Duly ordered. As an introvert, sometimes it’s hard to fully express my love, but I think he knows that every time I sneak him a bagel from the new hire orientation or let him know we’re have breakfast tacos at the office and this might be an excellent time for an IT service call (wink, wink), I’m telling him I love him and always thinking of him.
It sounds like if your dad and mine had ever met, they would have had a lot in common.
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Isn’t it amazing how little things like that just say, “I’m thinking about you,” which is to say, “you are important to me”?
They did meet, actually. We were in sixth grade and you came over on Christmas to give me a present, a fuzzy, little harp seal statue that I’m sure I have somewhere still. You and I went on and on like girls, me relating to you in comic fashion a ballet we had watched the night before. In fact, my dad and I had great merriment in watching the ballet and I was reenacting our jokes. Our dads had a long conversation in the other room about who-knows-what-all, but I know that my dad could get along with pretty much anyone because, one-on-one, he was interested in everyone.
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