Column: A father's love can be surprising

I recently cleaned out old files on my computer, coming across one I hadn't seen in six years.

It was the eulogy I wrote for and delivered at my father's funeral on June 30, 2012.

Reading through it for the first time in six years stirred up a lot of memories, some painful but mostly fond.

One particular line I had written jumped out at me as Father's Day approached this year: "Everybody has a father; but not every one has a dad. We are fortunate to have had both in the same man."

Any guy can be a father, but only a man has what it takes to be a dad. Mine was one of those.

Last month I wrote about a mom's love on Mother's Day. Today I write about a dad's love on Father's Day. Both love the same, and yet both love differently.

Dad's love was often surprising to me.

He showed me compassion as I spent nearly ten years the target of teasing and bullying. His direct intervention ended one particular bully's tirade virtually overnight.

I found it hard to approach my father on the subject, because he wasn't the type of guy to pull punches. He had been toughened growing up in Los Angeles and fighting neighborhood bullies.

But once I gathered the courage to ask Dad for help, two phone calls — one to the sheriff's office and one to the bully's father — resulted in an immediate end to the bullying as well as the boy's eventual transfer to another school district.

I expected Dad to regard me as weak for not handling the situation on my own. But he surprised me, showing the softer side that Mom always insisted he had.

When another bully began stealing my lunch, I borrowed a trick play out of Dad's playbook for living.

I prepared a fake lunch as bait, dressing a couple of Hostess treats with some zest and zip.

Actually, it was cream filling mixed with minced garlic, real lemon juice, black pepper, horse radish, Tabasco sauce and a few other exotic ingredients.

Like a little surgeon, I carefully split open the cakes, added the ingredients to the cream filling and closed them back up. I was counting on the fact that the bully was going to be too hungry to notice the treats were rewrapped.

At school the next morning, I placed the bait inside of a brown paper bag and set it in my locker.

When the bell rang for lunch, I made a bee-line for my locker to see if the bait had been taken. Sure enough, the paper bag was gone. The only question left was whether or not the bully actually ate the phony lunch.

Moments later, I got my answer. Three classmates spotted me and asked if that was my lunch that so-and-so had eaten.

"If it contained Hostess cupcakes, then yes," I replied.

Apparently, the bully had taken a few minutes during auto shop to enjoy the goodies found inside the brown paper bag. But his victory turned sour very quickly as soon as he put a large half cake in his mouth and swallowed.

He wasn't smart enough to spit out the trap, so he ran like a screeching banshee for the bathrooms, where he worshipped the porcelain god and gave up a sacrifice to it.

I was called into the counseling office the very next morning. I expected to be punished for inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on a fellow classmate.

No sooner had the counselor closed his door that he extended his hand to me and said, "I want to thank you. What you did has stopped a string of lunch thefts that have been happening lately."

Asked where I got the idea, I replied, "From my father. Only he wasn't as kind."

As funny as the incident was, it isn't my fondest of Dad.

That occurred toward the end of my freshman year in college. I was scholarshipped on a junior college track team and I did not get along with my coach.

The conflict came to a head late in the year. I decided I could not take my coach's ego or his mouth any longer, so I contacted a coach at another junior college and sought a transfer.

What I didn't know is that coaches are obligated to notify one another when athletes from other schools contact them. Considering I was a scholarshipped athlete, my coach was understandably upset. No, enraged was more like it.

I had a talk with Dad about the situation. I expected him to be on my side. After all, Dad had his share of conflicts with authority figures in his youth: Teachers, coaches, professors and commanding officers during his stint in the U.S. Air Force.

But Dad surprised me once again.

He told me to step up, act like a man, and humbly apologize to my coach for going behind his back.

Although my coach seemed like a (expletive) jerk, Dad said, that fact didn't give me the right to treat him badly, either.

Although I wanted to argue my side of things, I knew deep inside Dad was right. I did show up at Coach's office with my hat in my hand, taking full responsibility and asking for his forgiveness.

Coach had been glaring at me, but his look turned critical and then quizzical as I humbled myself before him.

"Give me one good reason why I should let you back on the team after what you pulled," he said.

I looked him in the eyes. "I don't have one," I said. "All I have is my humiliation."

Well, evidently that was good enough for Coach. He not only gave me another chance, but he also made me a team captain and introduced me to a new event, which I won third place for at the junior college regional championships the next Spring.

Thanks to Dad's wisdom, I saved my college scholarship and athletic career, which ended better than it had started.

Dad showed love in ways I least expected, but that's what made him such a special person. I couldn't predict his reactions; I could only brace for them like I did when he gave me bear hugs.

Dad was relatively young when he died at age 74, passing away on June 23, 2012.

He'd only been retired about four months, having worked virtually his entire life since he was eight years old. By the time the cancer was discovered, it had spread throughout his body.

He was gone less than two months after diagnosis.

I won't spend Father's Day uttering the odd phrase "f*** cancer," because that's the last thing Dad would want to do to the disease that ended his life.

I think he'd rather wad it up, cover it in leather hide, and hit it out of the ball park like he used to do decades ago as a Citrus College first baseman and one-time Los Angeles Angels prospect.

Today is a time to celebrate my memories of Dad; not mourn his loss or brood over the suffering that cancer caused him in his final days.

Dad was often a hard man to please. I felt that I would never live up to his standards and expectations. Like most other boys, I longed to one day hear my father tell me that I had become a man.

The day he did, I broke down and cried. Dad, after all, was full of surprises.