Digging back into Father’s Day advice, 20 years later

Always clean your shovel. Why? You may regret asking, but here goes ...

Twenty years ago, I wrote a newspaper column for Father’s Day based on folksy advice handed down from my dad: Always clean your shovel.

At the time I was a newbie father raising a wonderfully curious toddler. As it tends to be the case for any writer with a little ingenuity and a pressing deadline, I mined my own experience to suit the holiday.

What to do: Scrape the dirt off your shovel after every use. Brush it clean with steel bristles if necessary before stowing it away. Maybe pamper it with a gentle mist of WD-40.

Photo by Andres Siimon on Unsplash

Why? Otherwise, the shovel may rust. You don’t want to dull the blade and make your next job even harder.

As a young journalist I dug deep (sorry) into the handy metaphor for how shovel maintenance might apply to parental psychology.

All of us should keep our “shovel” spotless and sharp, I said. This may represent our mind (to keep intellectually stimulated), physique (staying fit), or talent (practice makes perfect).

It’s our figurative shovel that helps us burrow beneath the shallow surface of life and mine the essence of what it means to be human and inspired—to achieve deeper connections with the people and world around us.

Our “shovel” also can help us tunnel out of a bad situation—provided we take care not to give way to blind determination or enthusiasm and dig ourselves into a deeper hole.

Yes, I let myself run rhetorically wild with a mere garden tool.

Twenty years later I can’t help but have a more nuanced view of fatherhood, let alone the human condition.

The basic advice remains sound: Preparation and diligence often pay dividends. But I wrote that original column before the rise of smartphones and social media. Before the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Back then I worried how I would fare dispensing advice to my son as he grew up. Twenty years later, I don’t expect any father to possess the knowledge or foresight to truly prepare a child for everything they might face.

We should clean our shovels. But we also should expect rust to encroach, nonetheless.

Now I know fatherhood is more about simply being present and modeling behavior the best we can. Unsolicited advice I often dole out to new parents: Create a ritual of bedtime reading. It’s one of the most powerful small acts I’ve ever known to inhabit a household. That reverence for storytelling at the close of day, before an awestruck young mind slips off into the world of dreams, is one of my favorite memories of early childhood from the perspective of a son as well as a father.

Maybe it passes for wisdom that I see the delicate turning of a storybook page to be just as profound a symbol as a sharp shovel slicing into the earth.

Now that he’s an adult, my son and his Gen Z cohort give me plenty of hope for the future. I feel they’re well equipped to march forth into the world, become thoughtful fathers and mothers, and raise the next generation. In some ways I feel Gen Z is better in touch with their feelings and more mature than Gen X ever cared to be.

In another 20 years I’ll check back in just ahead of Father’s Day, and I’m sure they’ll have developed much better metaphors for timeless advice than a clean shovel.

---

Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

I’m proud to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Meet our writers here, or subscribe to our free weekly roundup and our Wednesday “Flipside” edition featuring sports, music, culture, and other topics.