Happy Birthday, Dad

And Thank You

Dear Friends,

It’s been a little longer than usual since you’ve heard from me, and I don’t exactly have an excuse. All I can say is that I’ve been suffering from a case of the summer doldrums. While I’ve kept myself busy working on short humor pieces, I haven’t had the focus to do much else.

It’s left me feeling a little like this:

_{Photo by Eva Bronzini from Pexels}

Yes, that’s a pancake.

In any case, I’m trying to figure out why this image captures my current state, and I think it’s because I’m waiting for things.

Answers from query letters. Answers from agents who have pages. And even an answer on a humor piece.

I’m not always good at waiting, especially if waiting => rejection.

Please don’t get me wrong, though. I really do think I’m quite gifted when it comes to rejection. I have vast numbers of rejection letters to my name, as I've shared. And since I’m conditioned to expect rejection, I’m quite good about moving on from it, too.

Still, every so often, I can find myself unable to jumpstart. And that’s not always easy to fix.

This is why I haven’t written on Substack. When I’m feeling blah, the last thing I want to do is spread that energy! (Although, as promised, when I skipped a post, I did do two sessions of resistance training for penance.)

But then I zoomed in on something important: my father.

Ultimately, he’s the reason I’m sitting down today to touch base with you, my Substack friends. The combination of stuck + rejection + Dad has finally, finally, given me some motivation.

Here’s why.

Last Sunday was Father’s Day, so Dad was naturally on my mind, including in the run-up. But it was also my son’s birthday, which definitely absorbed my focus, as well it should have. After the birthday was over, though, I had more available heart space for my father, and I think he’s been working on me for most of the week.

That’s because today is his birthday. He would have turned 92.

My father wasn’t an overbearing sort, not intentionally, anyway, and not in the usual sense. He just had what I think of as overwhelming optimism, which truly defined him until a lung cancer diagnosis. Excluding those four years when he had to fight for his survival and was uncharacteristically down and grouchy toward the end (fair enough given the pain), he was the most positive person I have ever known.

Having a positive father had some pretty amazing upsides. It was hard to do wrong with my dad. If you studied hard and got a 100 on a spelling test? Yay! Look what you could do if you put your mind to it! If you were playing basketball and missed ten shots in a row? Yay! It was just a game!

And positivity meant he was always looking for ways to have fun. He worked incredibly hard at his job, which meant my two sisters and I wanted more time with him than he could sometimes give us. But in our childhood, he devoted late evenings and weekends to us, making milkshakes, running us up and down the icy streets in a sled when it snowed, taking us to hockey games. Sometimes, we’d be so excited to see him by the time he left work that we would literally walk half-a-mile just so we could have a few extra minutes with him in the car.

Life got even busier for him as time went by, but we still had dinner together every night, he still took us to Tigers games, and he still piled us into the car so we could visit the National Parks. He still made surprise visits to see me in college. And he still cheered me on in my family and writing lives.

Dad wasn’t perfect. No one is. But he set a great example for his kids and grandkids, and he lived by it: Stay positive. Find joy. Don’t give up.

So fast forward to June 2026, when I’ve been stuck for no apparent reason. Because Dad has been on my mind so much, I imagined what I would sound like describing my current state to him.

Hi Dad. Yep, everything’s fine. Just working on humor, which is really crazy. I was always a late bloomer, right?! But, yeah, I’m still feeling a little stuck. Just blah. Time is passing…

And I literally had to stop with this insane inner monologue.

It was a monologue because what would Dad have even said?!

He would have found my attitude completely alien. I mean, there would have been very little to discuss. If I’d lived under his roof and he’d seen me looking like that pancake, he would have dragged me to the basement to play ping pong.

He would have helped me out of my funk.

So by now, you might be asking yourself how this relates to rejection—what I mentioned at the beginning of this post. After all, my dad knew how hard I persisted with my writing—he was a cheerleader in that department. But I’d forgotten that rejection had found a way to touch my relationship with him even after he’d died.

And I remembered that this week.

Back in 2022, a year after Dad passed, I submitted a Tiny Love Story to The New York Times. For those of you who aren’t familiar, these are 100-word love stories, and the love stories can be about anything. While sad, my story sort of summed up the role Dad often played throughout my life.

And of course, the story got rejected!

Dad would have smiled at this, and I didn’t take it hard as a result. After all, resilience is one of the best by-products of positivity. Dad certainly would have told me to march on, and I did.

But this week, from my stuck place, I went back and looked at the piece, and discovered that Dad’s optimism can still work on me, even though he’s been gone for almost five years. The episode I recounted in that story was exactly what I needed to remember this week.

This is what I wrote:

When Dad died, I was relieved I still had some of his voicemails as keepsakes, but I couldn’t bear to listen to them. Finally, on the anniversary of his passing, I was ready to hear his voice. My hands shook holding my cellphone.

None of his messages would open.

I feared the worst. Had the phone company’s reassignment of his cell number somehow erased my treasure? I kept trying, panicked, until finally, a miracle. One opened.

“Hi sweetheart,” Dad said. “A call came from someone…I think it was you. Sorry I couldn’t pick up.”

Thank you for calling back, Dad.

Yes, thank you for the return call this week, Dad. For helping me out of my stuck place.

You inspired this post.

You reminded me to kick myself in the butt and keep going.

You dragged me to the basement to play ping pong after all.

Sending love right back to you.

Happy Birthday, Dad.

❤️❤️❤️