It's Father's Day tomorrow - the traditional day of rest for dads.
But today, my father will be on the move.He'll be running the lawn mower, running errands, running to the golf course for a little one-on-one competition.
And this evening, when he runs down, he'll likely stop and take a few moments to watch the songbirds feed and fly among his sycamore trees.
Birds intrigue my father. They love to sing, and they love to fly.
The Maker gave birds and my father a similar heart.
I know.
Over the past few years, I've thought long and hard about that heart.
The Bible uses the word "heart" 762 times. I've used it almost that many times in my column. It's a spiritual word with a hundred shadings: gentleness, courage, charity, desire. The word sits at the "heart" of all religion.
It also sits at the heart of my father's life.
Two years ago he had open-heart surgery. His own father died of heart failure. So did his brother. So the family spends a good deal of time discussing my father's heart.
And most of the time, we simply marvel.
When the surgeons cut him open, for instance, they thought they'd find arteries, valves and muscle tissue. But they got a shock.
Inside they found a full reserve of fortitude, grit and competitive juices.
The family knew such things were in there all along, of course. Dad's famous for steeling himself against adversity.
For my father, a healthy heart is never full of blood.
It's full of ice water.
It's cool and collected enough to hit a game-winning home run in the ninth inning, filled with enough valor to land a B-24 bomber safely while the rest of the crew stands at the bombay doors in their parachutes.
All of which he's done.
My father doesn't often use the word "heart." He prefers the body parts "guts" and "backbone."
But we know what he means.
When doctors look at Dad's heart they see blood and tissue.
When he looks at it he sees pluck and spunk.
But when I look at my father's heart, I see something all together different. I see something that is growing.
His heart may have been sliced open on the operating table.
But that isn't the heart I see.
It may have carried him through a war, cancer, heart disease and the passing of my mother.
But that isn't the heart I'll remember.
No, the stories about the young pilot playing fox-and-geese in the clouds with his stout-hearted bomber squadron won't last half as long in my mind as the memories of him making paper airplanes with when I was 6.
For, in the end, that is the "father heart" I carry in mine.
The tender heart. The broken heart. The heart of The Shepherd.
It is the heart that stood in pioneer garb at Carthage Jail and sang "A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief" until the room filled with tears.
It is a heart grown softer through suffering, more generous through giving.
A heart that has learned to buy Hard Rock Cafe hats for the grandkids, send embossed greeting cards to the daughters-in-law and grow misty over departures.
It is the heart he will hide away today as he hustles about his duties - shoring up the family, tilling his soil, tugging his driver from the bag on hole #3 while the rest of the foursome plays it safe with four-irons.
The "father heart" I wouldn't trade for any other is the one that will finally emerge this evening; the one that will stand at the kitchen window to watch those wild birds play fox-and-geese among the leaves - just as he did years ago.
It is the heart that will listen to their sweet anthems and sing back to them.