The Bell Curve:

One of the tricks of writing a column is to use even the remotest of holidays as a theme. Father’s Day is a slam dunk. So bear with me, even though we’re four days late.

I‘ve pretty much made it a policy, whenever possible, to ignore Mother’s and Father’s Days as commercial creations designed to sell flowers, candy and coffee-table books.

This attitude has long been regarded as un-American by the God-fearing people in my life. So when I became a father and my girl children started making Father’s Day cards for me in school, which I pinned to the wall over my desk, I caved in.

And lately I’ve begun to wonder whether my own father had ever been properly eulogized on this day.

I don’t remember Father’s Day ever being celebrated when I was a child. Maybe it didn’t exist then.

But I have a feeling my father would have treated the occasion much as I have — warmed by the attention but not devastated if it is overlooked. He tended to regard life in much the same way. At least I thought he did. He didn’t talk a lot about his own deep feelings. But his actions spoke for him. There was never a moment in my life when I didn’t feel his support. Even if that support required punishment, it was always calm and fair.

My father was an Indiana farm boy who played a mean trombone. He never served his country in a war, never was elected to public office or saved a life that we knew about. His heroism was quiet survival. He was in dead center of the generation hardest hit by the Great Depression, a middle-class businessman who had created a modest group of chain retail stores on borrowed money that fell like dominoes after the first one went down, until our house was the last domino to fall.

He never recovered financially, and if he was troubled emotionally to end his working life as a clerk in a department store, we never saw it.

He always provided and somehow never lost the patina of middle-class Midwestern, which he passed along quietly to my brother and me, accompanied by a wonderfully wry sense of humor.

I remember him in bits and pieces. He was a Democrat in an extended family of rabid Republicans.

He didn’t argue politics — or anything else for that matter — but one of his prized possessions was a framed front page of the Chicago Tribune announcing — so wonderfully wrong — that Dewey had defeated Truman in the presidential election of ’48. My mother, who canceled my father’s vote for a lifetime, allowed him to hang this statement in the bathroom we all shared.

Other vignettes come to mind. My father waving goodbye to me after letting me out at a crossroads in central Florida when his selling route took him inland and I was hitchhiking to a job in Indiana where I could live with relatives and earn enough to get me to college the following year. Or his stash of beer in the basement where he retreated for a small buzz in a teetotaling household. Or sitting outside an auction hall where a lifetime of belongings were being sold off for nickels and dimes. Or the two days we spent together in a car when I drove him to a retirement home near my brother in Florida and tried — unsuccessfully — to get answers to questions about his early life.

I don’t call these memories up often, but this turned out to be a very special Father’s Day that offered an unexpected sense of clarity to a definition of family for me.

We create families under all sorts of circumstances, wherever we go. In the military, on athletic teams, in the organizations we choose to join and in the workplace, and increasingly these families have replaced the nuclear family.

That reflects the culture in which these families are created. Because more than half of them end in divorce, the concept of the nuclear family has been divided and then subdivided until the core that started all this subdivision is lost. Or maybe just misplaced.

That’s not denying the risks of this path. Only to affirm the existence of the family core — good or bad or both — and the enlightenment and maybe hope that it can engender.

That whatever else goes on, whatever misunderstandings or angers have taken residence in one’s psyche, the core remains the same.

It was only coincidence that these thoughts occurred around Father’s Day.

I haven’t gone soft on that, even though my daughters are now giving me beer nuts and computer parts along with their grown-up cards — coming right out of the family core.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.