Whenever he walked through our front door after being away for any meaningful length of time, my late father whistled.

He did not whistle out of glee, delight, or even habit but to announce his presence. He whistled as a way to let his family know that he had come home. 

His whistle did not carry a specific tune—it was nothing like the melodic “family whistle” used by Frances McDormand to beckon her rock journalist son in Cameron Crowe’s movie Almost Famous. To the contrary, his whistle was clear, quick, workmanlike. There was nothing elaborate or fussy about it. 

When I think of my father’s whistle, I associate it with an accompanying noise: the rustle of his house key as he was unlocking the door. Those sounds—the racket of the key and the lock, and the whistle that invariably followed—signaled that my mother, my brother, and I had made it through the interregnum between my father’s departure and return.

You might ask: Where had my father been that he felt obliged to broadcast his reappearance? He was at work—his job! Evidently, I am a member of one of the last generations in which fatherhood was, in part, associated with absence. Each day, my father drove to his job, which, for a not insignificant portion of my Louisiana childhood, was located in New Orleans, far across Lake Pontchartrain from our suburb on the Northshore. My mother, who got through life without the benefit of a driver’s license, was on her own with two small children. She managed brilliantly, but I know she felt relief when she heard his whistle each weekday afternoon around 5 o’clock.

Sometimes my father was required to be even further afield than New Orleans. His was the age of business trips, and such trips usually meant air travel—an added stressor. My mother always left my father a note to stay safe; my father often left me a note, discovered as I was pouring my Cheerios on the morning of his departure, to help Mom while he was away. Such were the rituals of my early childhood: the anxiety of a father going away, the consolation of a father coming back.

In between, of course, there was fun to be had in Dad’s absence. 

All self-respecting sophisticated film fans will remember the scene in Terrence Malick’s masterpiece The Tree of Life in which the mother (Jessica Chastain) informs her brood of unruly boys that their father (Brad Pitt), a disciplinarian, has departed on a trip. The lads proceed to run wild through their house and torment their mother with a lizard. My brother and I were not inclined to such misbehavior, but it was certainly in the natural order of things that, growing up, our mother was present on an hourly basis while our father made appearances after work and on weekends. 

Children raised in the era of remote work and Zoom calls might never know how much a father is treasured if he is home some of the time rather than all of the time.

I thought again of this familial history because, with the arrival of the week of Thanksgiving, we have entered the season of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. This classic movie, written and directed by John Hughes, stars Steve Martin as Neal Page, a traveling advertising man whose earnest effort to spend the holiday in the company of his lovely wife and adoring children is torn asunder by winter weather, uncooperative rental car agencies, and the potentially lethal (though actually salutary) friendship of a sycophantic drifter, Del Griffith (John Candy). 

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In November 1987, when Planes, Trains and Automobiles was released to polite notices, I was all of 4 years old, which was, of course, much too young to see an R-rated movie, even one as well-meaning as this one. But, thanks to eventual viewings on cable and videocassette, I became intimately familiar with the film. Although my father, amazingly, shared the same first name as the John Candy character (Del), I associated him entirely and exclusively with Steve Martin’s urbane, sophisticated, slightly ill-tempered Neal Page.

I could easily imagine my father navigating a city sidewalk to hail a cab to the airport, as Neal does in the breathless opening scene. I could picture him engaged in heated debate with the rental car agency representative, as Neal is in one famously salty scene. And I certainly remember him calling home to give my mother updates on his estimated time of arrival, as Neal does throughout the picture.

If Neal had worked from home—if Neal’s advertising agency had not insisted that he meet certain clients in person, despite the inconvenience of travel during a holiday—his family would have been denied the ultimate joy of seeing him when he finally arrives, with the surprise special guest Del, on Thanksgiving Day. I know something of the jubilance Neal’s family experiences when they see him walk through the front door. My family had it each time we heard my father whistle.