A Gold Star from Dad

The Boston Herald     

The stars are a new thing. When he mentioned them the first time I thought they were a figure of speech. “I’m giving you a gold star, today,” my father said.

“Why are you giving me a gold star?” I asked, humoring him.

“Because you called,” he said.

I thought getting a gold star was like hitting a home run, a phrase, an “Atta girl!”        

“Louise’s daughters call her all the time.” This is what my father used to say before the star thing. Louise is my father’s wife. “Louise is always on the phone with her daughters.  They talk about everything. Sometimes they call twice a day.”      

“We talk,” I protested. “Aren’t we talking now?”  

“You don’t call every day,” he said.

“Almost every day,” I told him.

But I was wrong. “You got four stars this week,” my father announced one day at the beginning of June.

“No sir, Dad. I called more than that.”

“No, you didn’t.” And that’s when he told me he was keeping track of how often I called him. And that the stars were real.

“Of course they’re real. I bought them at Staples.”    

“I got just four stars? Are you sure?”

He had his proof right there in front of him on his calendar, on his desk: Teacher stars, silver and gold top-of-the-spelling-paper stars, the kind you worked hard for as a kid. He was looking at them. They were all silver. The gold he reserves for special occasions, he explained. And he decides what these special occasions are.

It’s funny how well my father knows me. He should, I suppose. But I am so long past the age when a paper star should mean anything. Who would have guessed that this silly game would be a motivator for me to pick up the phone? Who could have imagined that a few little stars would change me, and us?

 My father knew. 

Every day that I call he puts a silver star on that day’s square and every day that I don’t, he sticks on a half moon. “Why the half moon, Dad?” I asked one afternoon when I stopped by.

“They’re just circles cut in half,” he said. But are they just circles?  Or are they, like the stars, a lot more?

The half moons are red and there were five on the calendar for July. “Look. You called 26 days,” my father said. “Look at all the silver stars.”

But all I could see were half moons.

I would have insisted that I called him every day. I thought I did. But the moon and the stars don’t lie.

Ten p.m. rolls around now and if I haven’t checked in, I do, even though it’s late. Even though I think I’m disturbing him.  

He says I never disturb him. And I believe him. He comes to the phone no matter what time I call, happy to hear my voice. And I think, how come it took stars on a calendar to get me to do this? How come I overlooked such a simple thing for so many years?      

He says when I get 100 stars he’s going to buy me a prize.

“How many stars do I have now, Dad?”

“You’re not even close.”      

“What kind of a prize?”      

“I’m not telling.”        

“What if I call twice a day. Do I get two stars?”     

“No. You get just one star per day.”    

One silver star a day. And sometimes a gold one, when he decides. How old are we, I wonder? 

Not too old for made-up rules and paper stars and hoped for prizes, that’s for sure. And not too old, ever, for my father to be my father, wanting to hear my voice, wanting to know about my day, wanting to be part of my world.

I tell him I will do better. I tell him he should go out right now and buy more silver stars because next month I am going to make his calendar shimmer. And though I can’t see him, I know he is smiling.