My father brought some strawberries by the other day, freshly picked from his garden. Apparently several days had gone by since the last time he picked strawberries, so he got quite a haul, considering that he doesn’t have that many strawberry plants. They were red and still warm for the sun, and he said “here, eat one,” and handed it to me, and I did, and it was good, red all the way through and juicy but not dripping, and although it was a tad too ripe, it hadn’t quite reached that strange sour stage that strawberries get to when they are allowed to sit too long on the plant. And then we talked about the travesty that is supermarket strawberries, and he suggested that I wash his before eating them, because “they might have been pecked a bit.”

Last year, I wrote, in reference to Father’s Day: “I always think that it’s rather preposterous to set aside a single day of the year for appreciation of fathers.” And I stand by that statement. In my world, every day is father’s day, because not a day goes by that I don’t think of my father, and I tend to call him or see him in person every few days, because I am fortunate enough to live close to him.

I know that different people have different sorts of relationships with their parents, as evidenced by a lively discussion going on right now at the message boards I have been posting on for almost 10 years. We’re a cantankerous family now, and the topic of Father’s Day came up, and the results were explosive, with some people writing very wistful, sad things about their fathers, while others lambasted them, and the wannabe hipsters like me derided the day as a cheap, Hallmark holiday.

Discussing this later in Top Secret Online Scrabble, one of my fellow posters said “and I really love Father’s Day, Hallmark holiday that it is,” and I responded “I unabashedly love my father,” and went on to say that neither of us is very emotionally demonstrative, and it’s true. When my father showed up shyly on the porch with his strawberries, we had a silent wordless exchange in which we said everything that needed to be said without getting all maudlin about it, and that was that, and everything was good, and now I am eating strawberries chilled from the fridge, with sour cream and brown sugar, a favourite summer treat of my childhood.

But maybe my friend is right. Perhaps being emotionally demonstrative is an important part of life, and, as she pointed out, for those of us who aren’t very demonstrative, Father’s Day provides a nice excuse for doing it. Her father, she told me, keeps all of the Father’s Day cards she’s made for him, and that reminded me that my father has all of my baby teeth squirreled away in a drawer somewhere, and that in turn caused me to wonder what I will do with those particular artifacts when the time comes that they are my responsibility.

Maybe I’ve been reading too many books about dead people lately, and getting all morbid, but sometimes I think about these things, and I wonder how I would feel if my father leaves behind no physical proof of my love for him after he is gone. While the power of intangible love is indeed great, and I know that he knows how I think of him, perhaps, this year, I will go ahead and spell it out, just to be sure that we’re all on the same page here, strawberries and all.