Two Fathers

Updated at 6:10 p.m. ET on June 14, 2024

We reminisce on Father’s Day about the men who raised us. But this year, I’ve been thinking about two men who were like fathers to me. They never had children of their own, and yet helped shape me as much as my own father did. One was my uncle; the other was a teacher.

These men were important to me because I grew up in an unstable family where there were a lot of opportunities for me to go wrong. (And often, I did go wrong.) My parents loved each other, but their relationship began as an ugly 1950s factory-town story, in which my father was a middle-aged, divorced cad who became smitten with a much younger woman. He was working in a bar when they met and it was immediately a hot mess of a thing.

They got married and I was born five months later. Both my parents worked, but my mother drank and my father raged and felt trapped. (He once admitted that he only planned to stick around long enough to “give me a name”—that was still a thing 60 years ago.) There’s a happy ending: She overcame the bottle, he realized he couldn’t live without her, and they stayed married for 40 years, until her death. My father and I, in the end, were always close.

But it was a rough ride, and I spent