I would have wished my husband a Happy Father’s Day this morning, but I couldn’t find him.

Rick always – and I mean, always – wakes up before I do, so having to hunt him down is not something with which I am unfamiliar.

I looked in the kitchen, where he normally empties the dishwasher, but he wasn’t there.

I looked in the laundry room, where he often passes time making up for a week of dirty clothes on Sunday mornings, but he wasn’t there.

I looked in the driveway, where he might be washing both cars, but he wasn’t there and both cars were in the garage, which meant he wasn’t off filling mine up with gas because I have a long trip tomorrow. Then I remembered he did that yesterday.

I looked in the basement and saw only an empty treadmill, which he uses not because he likes to walk really fast or to sweat – he truly does not enjoy doing either — but because he wants to control his blood pressure and lower any risk that he will leave his children at a young age.

Then I remembered and looked out our living room window and sure enough, there he was, shovel in hand and big smile on his dripping face, standing next to a large mound of dirt wearing old ratty jeans and a soaked Alabama t-shirt (bought in for five bucks when I was doing a story there a couple hundred years ago) at 8:30 in the morning.

I’m sure many fathers this morning are working jobs they’d rather not be working. I’m just as sure there are many out golfing, at the gym, sleeping or having a nice breakfast. I’m pretty sure not many are standing next to a big pile of dirt and kind of liking it.

Why would my husband be standing next to a big pile of dirt on Father’s Day morning or any morning, you ask? Well, I will tell you.

Because it’s a given that when your family is still trying to make up for your wife’s lost job’s wages and agonizing over your new insurance premiums that are about to go up 135 percent, someone is going to tell you that if you don’t replace your roof and soon, you won’t have one. And just when you have digested that, while getting your kids off to school with your wife out of town, you’re going to walk into your laundry room and see several inches of sludge-filled water coursing out of the drain on the floor. And you’re going to know, because you just went through this last year, that this means your front yard, including the shrubbery you just planted, is going to be dug up in order to locate the pipe that just burst.

Because you just went through this and because you’re a man who pays close attention to such things, you also suspect they will do something while trying to find the pipe that will make the repair even tougher and the job more expensive. What you don’t know yet, even though you tried to warn them, is that they are also going to bust up your sprinkler system in the process.

So you watch them dig and listen to them explain why they just cost you several thousand more dollars, and instead of yelling at them – because you are not the type of man to do that – you go into the house and get your camera and your 12-year-old son and you start taking pictures of exactly where the broken sprinkler pipe and shredded wires are, so that when they cover the hole, you will know where to find them so you can fix them yourself.

Then you take the son who shares your passion for fixing things to the hardware store – and even bring  your almost-15-year-old complaining daughter along (on the way to taking her to get a second piercing in her ear) – and make a fun project out of the whole thing.

Even though you weigh only marginally more than the shovel you’re using and you’re of a religious persuasion that enjoys jokes about how challenged their men are at fixing things, you spend the better part of a Saturday digging the dirt back out of the hole they used a crane to fill.

Of course, you can’t find the sprinkler pipe or the wires right away, despite the pictures, so you dig way more dirt than you planned. But you still don’t get in a foul mood and take it out on the family the way your wife might, and even clean up in time to spend the entire day with them.

And then on Father’s Day, you wake up before anyone else in the neighborhood, put on the jeans your daughter thinks are embarrassing (though they’re better than the acid-washed pair you usually wear for jobs like this) and locate the wires, which produces the proud and dirty smile you flash your wife, who has arisen several hours later.

But you still don’t finish the job. You come in and shower (since you’re a very hygienic kind of guy, even though you don’t mind dirt) because you know your son won’t wake up for several more hours and you promised him he could help connect all the wires.

None of this sounds the least bit fun to your wife and truthfully, you would have preferred to just finish the job. But you know your son is looking forward to it and because of that, you are too.

This is your idea of a good Father’s Day.

This is your family’s idea of a great father.

(Happy Father’s Day, honey! We love you.)

I think of many things on Father’s Day.

I think of omelets because my dad was great at making them. If my mother ever asked him to, say, bake a potato, I’m sure he would have panicked. But he made beautiful omelets. Fluffy and perfect with whatever you could dream of to go inside, providing we had it in the refrigerator.

My dad was big on breakfast. All of us would sit queasy and silent on dark winter mornings, waiting for the obscenely early school bus while he ladled heaping bowls of steaming cream of wheat before us, pretending he didn’t hear the gagging sounds that followed and insisting we eat.

I think about how he worried. And if any world event had any remote chance of adversely affecting his family, he worried more. If there was a recall, the item must be destroyed. “But dad, our babyseat is a different brand than is being recalled. And it’s only being recalled in India.”

Things did not always make sense where it concerned my dad.

I think about how he loved sports, worshipped the Bears, admired pro golf, enjoyed baseball, liked to swim, even coached Little League. But he couldn’t play a game of catch without breaking his glasses. 

I think of how he seemed strong and unafraid but could cry at a particularly tender episode of “Little House on the Prairie.”

“You’re crying?” my mom would say.

“Jack the dog died,” my father would explain, wiping his eyes.

He was smart but sure you caught pneumonia from wet hair.

He was stubborn and had a temper, but hated for anyone to stay mad at him and was the most affectionate man I ever knew.

He could also soothe any crying baby handed to him. Didn’t have to know the baby, baby didn’t have to know him, but once in his arms that baby would stop crying, look deep into my father’s eyes and fall asleep within a minute. Every time.

My dad loved a good bowl of soup, had to be mad hot; a good hot dog with mustard and onion (“even though it doesn’t like me,” he would lament);  vanilla milkshakes and vanilla ice cream, even at “31 Flavors.”

“Again with the vanilla?” my mother would say. “It’s french vanilla,” my dad would reply, mushing it into soup. 

He wore the same style slippers and pajamas, and went to the same barber shop, drug store, dry cleaners and bank for close to 50 years – and at the exact same time each week. He lived on Maalox (see hot dog reference) and never had a good night’s sleep in his life.

“So how come I could hear you snoring?” my mom would say.

We teased him that he had no sense of humor, but he knew how to laugh and how to take a joke.

He never actually fixed anything that I’m aware of, but he loved his tools.

He couldn’t change the oil in his car but he loved his garage and nobody ‘s was cleaner (painted the floor of the garage, too, though no one could figure out why). He couldn’t barbecue either, but loved his lawn and his flower and vegetable gardens.

He was far from a neat freak but once every month or so, also for reasons unknown, he used an industrial buffer on the linoleum.

He could be tight with the buck but he was generous to a fault.

He would go anywhere, at any time and any distance for his children, including driving eight hours to pick me up from college and take me home, two round trips in one weekend, because I was homesick.

He was loyal and honest and adored his family. And no one will ever worry about us like he did.

He was a good father.

And I still can’t ruin an omelet without missing him terribly.

I recently made the point in this space that among my many talents, commemorating special occasions with thoughtful prose on greeting cards is not one of them.

Ironic, I know, especially because as a child, I thought that working for Hallmark would be a wonderful way to make a living since my mother always cried whenever she read my cards to her. Now, however, I know that mothers can cry over any number of things their children do, including scratching themselves in the school play.

I’m the one who usually goes for the Peanuts card that reads: “Happiness is a kiss on the nose . . .” or the one with the purple lilacs that says “Our love for you will not abate, for all eternity I will wait . . .”

I mean, how can you beat that?

Underneath, I’ll scrawl my feeble thanks to my husband for being such a wonderful father to our children, that I could not hope for one any better.

I rationalize that there really are no words to adequately capture feelings like these on the inside of a greeting card anyway.

I mean, how do you thank a person for flying across the country with your very small children to meet you at NBA Finals and Super Bowls he would never come close to actually seeing,  just so you would not have to be away from them for too long?

I remember at least one of those trips taken in the middle of potty training. And by “in the middle,” I mean it was not yet completed even though like many parents, I imagine, we made the mistake of thinking that if we wished for it hard enough and bribed the child long enough, somehow it would magically just happen.

I remember the hotel room in which the training failed, and I remember walking in just seconds after the clean-up to find only a sheepish grin on both daddy and child.

I know that mothers possess many great qualities but that fathers, or at least my children’s father, is the parent with the patience to sit through 613 straight episodes of “Sponge Bob” or worse, when it’s the only thing that makes a sick child happy.

If only fatherhood could be summed up on a greeting card or captured in a highlight reel. Rather it’s a million moments spread out over a lifetime. It’s the hockey games in the basement with pillows tied to your shins; amusement parks constructed of K’Nex and condominiums from Legos . It’s the weekend mornings spent coloring at the kitchen table and keeping beauty shop appointments where your toenails are painted pink, your hair combed against the grain and little hands tickled rather than massaged.  

It’s resisting the urge to protest the first time your son doesn’t want to kiss you in front of his friends, and biting back tears the first time a boy likes your baby girl and she likes him back. It’s preferring to be home with your kids over any golf course in the world, and never calling it “babysitting.”

It’s knowing every teacher’s name and after-school activity and carpool schedule and lunch preference without having to ask, and being able to remind your wife whenever necessary.

Once, when our daughter was four and Rick had to leave town for one night on his first-ever business trip, he was nearly out the door when Amanda ran to him and wrapped herself around his legs.

“Daddy,” she cried in desperation, “does mommy know what to do?”

He always did.

Still does.

And I’m thinking that might make a nice Father’s Day card.Read Melissa on ESPNChicago.com.