Father’s Day is this Sunday, June 21st. So this week I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad, Max Palmer, who died in 1994 at age 81. I’m one of the lucky ones who can say that my father was the best man I’ve ever known.

A Chicago businessman well-known for his honesty, kindness, and generosity, Dad came from a blue-collar background in Waterloo, Iowa. His formal education ended with high school and he never took a philosophy course. But he had an uncommon capacity to learn what it means to be fully human from what some have called the School of the Spirit.

Dad lived by the Golden Rule, but there was nothing heavy-handed about his ethics. His teachings often came in the form of maxims he passed along to my sisters and me — partly as guidance, partly in jest. A sense of humor was not optional in my family! As Chesterton said, “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”

Here’s a small sampling of Max’s maxims:

• “Remember, kids, there’s only one letter’s different between hero and zero.” (Groan!)
• “Add a little ‘oomph’ to ‘try’ and you’ve got ‘triumph’.” (Double groan!)
• “The only difference between a rut and a grave is dimension.” (Try to figure that one out at age ten!)
• “Today’s peacock is tomorrow’s feather duster.” (This one was never aimed at my sisters, but always at me. I wonder why Dad thought I had special need of this counsel?!)

I’ve spent a lot of my life pursuing the “higher learning,” taking those courses and reading — even writing! — the kind of books that were not part of Dad’s life. I value my education, of course. But what I value most is what I learned from my dad: the highest form of thinking is that which we do with the mind descended into the heart. The heart is where we integrate what we know in our heads with what we know in our bones, the place where our knowledge and we can become more fully human.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad! Thanks for all the wisdom, all the laughs, all the love!

Finding a Box of Family Letters
by Dana Gioia

The dead say little in their letters
they haven’t said before.
We find no secrets, and yet
how different every sentence sounds
heard across the years.

(Excerpted from Pity the Beautiful: Poems. Read the full poem here.)