SOUL FOOD:The origins of Father’s Day

She sat next to me on the small wooden passenger boat as we leisurely cruised the Bosporus, the strait that parts European from Asian Istanbul and joins the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara.

The day, two weeks ago, was sunny, warm and clear. A showy trio of jets thundered overhead in trial runs for an impending weekend race around the strait.

We chatted over their roar and despite my lack of Turkish as well as we could. Nurcihan — Noor-gee-haan, as best I can transliterate — speaks better than beginning English, yet as we talked she still labored at times to be understood.

Her name, she told me early on, means “light of the world.” A beautiful name, I told her; her parents, it would seem, must have been exceedingly happy at her birth.

A slight, reserved smile crossed Nurcihan’s young face. Yes, she acknowledged, that likely was the case.

She wore a bright, multicolored silk scarf that concealed her hair. Its design was made by the Turkish marbling method of painting called ebru, which before I’d only seen applied to paper.

A long, stylish beige coat covered Nurcihan’s blouse and most of her trousers, which fell well over her walking shoes. Only her pretty and gentle countenance and her delicate hands remained exposed.

From our boat, she pointed out the home of her husband’s aunt on Istanbul’s Asian shore, explaining how the short ferryboat trip there from the city’s European side cost roughly $1. Inexpensive and more direct than either of two bridges that join both coasts.

I asked about a building complex, elaborate and immense, looming on Istanbul’s Asian side. An elite military academy from which her brother had graduated, Nurcihan said.

Natives of Turkey, she and her husband now live in Irvine; they were in Istanbul to visit family and friends. The distance separating her from her family, I imagined, must be difficult to live with.

While living in Germany during the 1980s, as much as we savored it, my husband and I always felt the strain of having thousands of miles dividing us from our friends, our siblings and, particularly, our parents. Time and money made visits few, and as the saying goes, far between.

“Isn’t it hard,” I asked, “to be so far from your mother and father who named you Nurcihan?”

The sparkle in the eyes of this woman whose parents called her “light of the world” dimmed. I felt I’d suddenly plunged into conversational waters as deep as the Bosporus.

What had I said? In careful bits of English, Nurcihan began to explain.

The distance between her and her parents is far greater than that between Istanbul and Irvine. It’s not a journey she can make.

Both her mother and her father had died within one month of her marriage and move to Southern California.

But much like the biblical King David, when he said at the death of his infant son, “I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me,” Nurcihan expressed her hope of seeing them again.

“Someday,” she said, “I will die, too.” Which may on its face sound dismal, though that’s not at all how Nurcihan meant it.

As does David’s Abrahamic faith and Christianity, Islam teaches there is life after death. Just as David was sure that upon his own death he would rejoin his departed son, Nurcihan was conveying her trust that she, too, will in due time be reunited with her parents.

She is young to have lost her mother and father, but at any age, I’ve learned, losing a parent is not easy. My mother is still living but my father died nine years ago this month, shortly after Father’s Day and the first day of summer.

That’s when I truly began to comprehend what a friend, Ruth Ann Summers, had told me several years before. No matter how old you are when you lose your parents, you feel like an orphan nonetheless, this woman who was then older than my parents confided.

I smiled. I squeezed her hand. I respected her sentiment and sensed her bereavement. But until the death of my own father, I could not partake of it.

With each passing year, more of my friends become members of this inevitable society, which can make Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, at best, bittersweet. It’s a bond that surely transcends gender, ethnicity, religion and national citizenship.

While in Turkey, I was surprised to learn that Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are celebrated there in much the same way and on the very same days we celebrate them here, though I can’t quite tell you why.

When I asked about Father’s Day, which was quickly approaching and on people’s minds, no one could say how the commemoration migrated to Turkey or when. Here, its roots can be traced to a local celebration in a Spokane, Wash., church in 1910.

Fourteen years later, Calvin Coolidge is said to have declared Father’s Day a national observance, hoping to “establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children, and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.” Yet he did so, apparently, without tying it to a specific date.

In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson issued a proclamation honoring fathers, but it wasn’t until 1972 that Richard Nixon established the third Sunday of June for the national observance of Father’s Day.

Its fledgling celebration in a Spokane church scarcely makes it a religious occasion, even if it is celebrated on Sunday. But Christian and Hebrew scriptures do lend it a precedent.

“Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, that your days may be long, and that it may be well with you,” it’s written in Deuteronomy 5:16.

Similarly the Quran exhorts the faithful in Sura 17:23: “Thy Lord hath decreed that ye worship none but Him, and that ye be kind to parents. Whether one or both of them attain old age in thy life, say not to them a word of contempt, nor repel them, but address them in terms of honor.”

This Sunday, Nurcihan and others who are left to contend with Father’s Day in the absence of their fathers will be in my prayers.

If you are fortunate enough to still have your father with you, God bless you both with the happiest of Father’s Days.