REMEMBERING DAD'S LOVE.

Byline: RICHARD NEMEC

Local View

HE nestles in my left arm as comfortably as the footballs I once carried in the backyard as a young boy in the 1950s. He is pudgy and pinchable, and definitely kissable. The ready grin on my third grandson's face tells me he knows he has a string on my heart.

I sit in a sun-bathed family room of my son's in-laws' house in Concord, Mass., far from my own home in Los Angeles, but I strangely feel very much at home here, trapped in the wide-eyed gaze of a 3-month-old whose rosy skin and pate of blondish-red hair feels like the a rare Hope diamond in my arms.

Philip Cunningham, who has to fight for time with my other two "favorite grandsons," Alex and Teddy, has caused me to reassess Father's Day, an annual occasion I have disdained in the past, having the sense it was a bone thrown to the male side of parenting. Mother's Day is treated with much more respect and importance.

As I bonded with my newest grandson over Memorial Day weekend, giving him a new adult face to stare into, I thought about my son's newfound role as the father of a threesome, none of whom has yet tasted disappointment, failure or decades of waiting for the Cubs to get into a World Series. He has a lot of important work ahead of him, and so do I, having now bonded with three young souls that need a male's balancing touch.

Mothers, it is undeniable, have the early-impact edge, having to carry each child nine months and then literally nurture them in their first days out of the womb. But dads have the harder job of steering them around the edgy corners of life, giving them a sense of wonderment and reality testing.

Moms tend to do a lot of worrying at different stages of life, particularly regarding boys. Dads want kids to plunge ahead, recognizing risks and limitations, but they tend to feel youngsters should take chances. Who is the parent pushing kids onto scooters, tricycles, soccer and football fields, and into competitive sports?

That's why grandparents are important, too. You can never have too many parental influences, and particularly male influences, in our electronic-dominated, fast-paced 21st century. The statistics are appalling today regarding the number of single-parent (adult) households in which youngsters grow up.

More than one-third of the children in America today grow up apart from their biological fathers, and a female heads more than one-quarter of the households. When the statistics are broken down by race, the figures are staggering in the African-American community, where nearly 60percent of the households are fatherless. With increasing acceptance of births out of wedlock and divorce whenever it feels right, the stats keep going up.

After all, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is divorcing his wife of 20 years, leaving two teenagers behind, and he has two adult daughters from "liaisons" when he was a young man. To his credit, the mayor supposedly helped support and raise the two.

So, I have renewed respect for my son and all the fathers who are raising young children these days. And I see renewed importance for myself, as a grandfather, to help nurture these youngsters.

Children need to see different, mature faces of authority figures from whom they can learn and show respect. And they need to see grizzly male profiles that will remind them where they came from and what they need to do to lead healthy, normal, law-abiding lives.

I grew up with two grandfathers and had a father who was always around. While I was never close to my father, I knew he was someone I could go to and that he would listen. Fathers always do.