I trace my fingers over my father's face in the album. I miss him. Still. After 23 years. Each time I stumble across a picture of him unexpectedly, my heart drips round red drops of blood and my eyes tear up. As a child I had thought that he was probably the most perfect dad in the world. As an adult I knew he had faults but I still feel the same way. He had protected and nurtured me through my worst teen years, loving me unconditionally and accepting me for who I was. He always made me feel beautiful in spite of zits and frizzy hair and all the other "uglies" that attack teenagers. My father didn't give a fig about those things. He called me "Princess."

     This picture is on my wedding day. The flash had not gone off so it was kind of sepia toned. I had on my wedding dress with the 150 year old lace and a long, train-length mantia. My father was in a pale yellow double breasted suit coat. The picture looks like it could be 100 years old. My father is grinning with his head cocked sideways at me. My eyes are crinkled with laughter although one hand covers my mouth to stifle the giggles that even today I remember.

     "Are you nervous, Princess?" He had asked.

     "A little," I conceded.

     "About like a cat on a hot tin roof trying to cover up two piles at once?" I remember giggling and then being embraced in that wonderful bear hug of his. "I love you, sweetie," he said in my ear in his heart-melting soft southern drawl. There were tears in his eyes.

     I miss his gentle strength. I hope somehow that I can teach my boys how to love in that way. What it means to be that kind of father. Strong and tender. And neither ashamed nor afraid to love.

     He had been a Golden Gloves boxing champ in his youth and went on to play professional baseball for the St. Louis Browns for a couple of seasons. When he had earned enough money, he enrolled at UCLA and played football one year. But the War started. He joined the Navy. He married my mom and she was pregnant when he shipped out for Saipan. After the war they moved to Oregon and after an abortive attempt at chicken farming, he began working for Rich Manufacturing Company in Portland, Oregon. They made cast iron pipes. I remember standing on a catwalk overhead with his boss and watching my dad work. Shirt off and muscles rippling, he dipped a ladle of molten metal carefully from a vat and slowly poured it into a mold. An impurity in the melt caused it to bubble and a large glowing drop shot up and then fell. I watched transfixed as it descended to my father's boot and lay there, a bright ember searing a widening black hole through his boot while he unflinchingly continued to pour from his ladle. When the task was done, he replaced the ladle carefully before grabbing his boot and tearing it off. The metal had burned a hole almost completely through his foot.

     This was the same man who carefully brushed my long brown hair into shiny, springy finger curls every morning before school. I wore long curls until I was in the seventh grade just because my father fixed them. No one teased me about long curls, either.

     The year I was thirteen we bought a bowling alley and when he was fixing a machine someone thought it would be funny to press the reset button. The sweep bar descended, trapping my father's foot in its gears and tearing off the end of one toe. My father calmly finished his job then bandaged his foot and went back to work. The next day my mom insisted that he go to the doctor but nothing could be done about the missing toe.

     That was the same year my sister insisted that I start shaving my legs. I waited until no one was home before I tried the first time because I didn't know how to do it and I was too embarrassed to ask for help or show my ignorance. It was my father who found me in the bathroom hacking up my legs with a dry razor and crying. He knocked on the door. "Are you OK, Princess?" he asked, "Can I come in?"

     Viewing the carnage in process, he neither smiled nor laughed. "Here, honey, let me show you how to do this," he gave me one of those big hugs and did not scold me for ruining a perfectly good blade in his razor. He sat me on the toilet seat lid and he perched on the edge of the bathtub. Taking one leg, he lathered it up with shaving soap and finished the job without a nick or a scratch. He then shaved my other leg. "There, now, that wasn't so bad, was it?" he asked. He pulled his wallet from his pocket. "Go buy yourself a nice new razor at the Rexall. Stop and get something at the DQ, too, it'll make you feel better." He kissed me and pushed me out the door.

     Will I raise boys who will so lovingly shave their daughters' hairy legs? How do you teach that kind of tenderness? How do you teach them to love children so unconditionally and have a bottomless well of patience?

     My baby brother, Jesse, was also born the year I was thirteen. My father was ecstatic. Unfortunately, my brother was retarded and had epilepsy. He was a beautiful child, though, and my father could not have loved him more if he had been a prodigy. The three of us went bowling in Albany the year I started college at OSU. My brother was four. He picked up Dad's bowling ball to put it on the rack but tripped and fell, crushing the end of his index finger. He stood up screaming and blood flew everywhere. My dad grabbed him; I grabbed the car keys; the desk man came running. "I'll go with you to give you directions to the hospital," he said.

     Dad drove and I held Jesse with his hand tightly against the side of my face where he couldn't see it while I tried to comfort and calm him. At the clinic, Dad tried to fill out a form but his hand was shaking so badly he couldn't. He handed the clipboard to me. "Here," he said, "I've got to go out and have a cigarette." I filled out the report and then held Jesse on my arm for 45 minutes while the doctor clipped skin, molded the tissue into some semblance of a finger and stitched it back up. When we went in search of my dad, we found him pacing the hall with about a carton of cigarette butts strewn all over the floor around him. There were tear stains on his cheeks. I gave him a bear hug. He needed it; he was still shaking.

     "You look like you've been through a war," he said, scrutinizing my blood-soaked face and clothes.

     "So do you," I responded.

     "And where are your shoes, girl?" he asked. I looked down at my feet. Sure enough, I was in my socks. It wasn't until we returned to the bowling alley that we discovered I had kicked off my bowling shoes before going outside. I had instinctively obeyed one of the few rules my father laid down. I didn't even remember running across the gravel parking lot.

     I dust off the cover of the wedding album and put it back on the shelf. I miss my father. I am sorry my children never knew him. There are tears in my eyes. I'm not sure if I'm feeling sorrier for myself or for all the children who will never know love like my father's.