THE celebration of Father’s Day has a more recent tradition than Mother’s Day, and in the beginning was often satirized as a “me too” celebration that was mostly fuelled by secular intentions, as indeed we see today, just as Mother’s Day has been hijacked by commerce. Despite these not too nice implications, it is a beautiful tradition, and indeed, even if it is only once a year, honoring fatherhood and male parenting is fitting and is a worthy complement to the celebration of Mother’s Day.
This celebration apparently started in the United States, although today practically all countries celebrate Father’s Day in one way or another, many of them also on the third Sunday of June as it is in the US. Quite a number, however, celebrate it on different months of the year. In the Catholic Church fathers are celebrated on March 19, the Feast of Saint Joseph, the foster father of Jesus.
In the Philippines Father’s Day is enthusiastically received as a day for celebration on the third Sunday of June, largely due to the influence of the United States. Of course, the commercialized aspect of it has a lot to do with its celebration—the sending of greeting cards, the advertising of male-oriented gifts, special offers in hotels and other dining establishments are the main and obvious signs of its celebration.
Today, I would like to reiterate what I had written about fathers in 2010, Father’s Day this year having just been celebrated last Sunday, June 17, as a tribute to my late husband, Reynaldo G. Suleik, father of our two daughters and grandfather of three girls and one boy. In memory of Rey, I have written of his life, compiled in two albums, “Remembering Rey” and “Remembering Rey in His Career at Philippine Airlines.” I also managed to write a tribute to him, which was published in July 2017, shortly after Father’s Day that year.
Rey had come from a poor family in Cotabato, brought up with his four siblings by a widowed mother, and graduated with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering. He eventually got employed by Philippine Airlines, and got sent to the United Kingdom to oversee the completion of airplanes that PAL had purchased. He basically set up the Operations Control Center, which served as the central organization that would coordinate the actions of various departments regarding schedule changes, rerouting and positioning of aircraft, crew, passengers, mail and freight for the entire PAL network when deviations from planned occur. OCC, under Rey’s stewardship, ensured corporate operational efficiency and punctuality, and turned around its unhappy reputation of inefficiency. At one point it earned a new tag “PLANE ALREADY LEFT” from the derisive “PLANE ALWAYS LATE.” After 33 years of committed service to PAL to which he had dedicated his career, Rey, by then the senior assistant vice president, opted for early retirement in 1997.
Committed as he was to his beloved PAL, he was a wonderful father to our two daughters, a great lolo to his grandchildren, and a husband whose love for me had endured 50 years. We were never on the short end of the stick, however busy he was. I would consider him a “just man” in the mold of Saint Joseph. And quoting Fr. Reuter, “This is the vocation of a father. To give and to ask nothing back. He gives life to his children and labor and love. He gives them all he has. Literally, he lays down his life for them, day by day. And when they are grown, he lets them go. . . The Daddy gives. This is love. This is religion.”